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ROBERT BURNS 

HIS LIFE, GENIUS 
ACHIEVEMENT 

BY 

W. E. HENLEY 







BOSTON AND NEW YORK 

HOUGHTON, MIFFLIN AND COMPANY 

(£&e Rtocrpibc prcs#, CambciDfle 

1897 







^ 



TO 

T. F. HENDERSON 

IN MEMORY OF 

MUCH DIFFICULT YET SATISFYING 

WORK 

HIS FELLOW IN BURNS 



W. E. H. 



Muswell Hill, 
Sth July 1897. 









ROBERT BURNS 1 5" 

(1759-1796) 

In 1759 the Kirk of Scotland, though a less potent 
and offensive tyranny than it had been in the good 
old times, was still a tyranny, and was still offensive 
and still potent enough to make life miserable, to 
warp the characters of men and women, and to turn 
the tempers and affections of many from the kindly, 
natural way. True it is that Hutcheson (1694-1746) 
had for some years taught, and taught with such 
authority as an University chair can give, a set of 
doctrines in absolute antagonism with the principles 
on which the Kirk of Scotland's rule was based, 
and with the ambitions which the majority in the 
Kirk of Scotland held in view. But these doctrines, 
sane and invigorating as they were, had not reached 
the general; and in all departments of life among 
the general the Kirk of Scotland was a paramount 
influence, and, despite the intrusion of some generous 
intelligences, was largely occupied with the work of 
narrowing the minds, perverting the instincts, and 
constraining the spiritual and social liberties of its 
subjects. In 1759, however, there was secreted the 
certainty of a revulsion against its ascendency; for 
that year saw the birth of the most popular poet, 
and the most anti-clerical withal, that Scotland ever 
l Copyright, 1897, by Houghton, Mifflin & Co. 



234 ROBERT BURNS 

bred. He came of the people on both sides; he 
had a high courage, a proud heart, a daring mind, a 
matchless gift of speech, an abundance of humour 
and wit and fire ; he was a poet in whom were quint- 
essentialized the elements of the Vernacular Genius, 
in whose work the effects and the traditions of the 
Vernacular School, which had struggled back into 
being in the Kirk's despite, were repeated with sur- 
passing brilliancy; and in the matter of the Kirk 
he did for the people a piece of service equal and 
similar to that which was done on other lines and 
in other spheres by Hutcheson and Hume and 
Adam Smith. He was apostle and avenger as well 
as maker. He did more than give Scotland songs to 
sing and rhymes to read : he showed that laughter 
and the joy of life need be no crimes, and that 
freedom of thought and sentiment and action is 
within the reach of him that will stretch forth his 
hand to take it. He pushed his demonstration to 
extremes ; often his teaching has been grossly misread 
and misapprehended ; no doubt, too, he died of his 
effort — and himself. But most men do as they must 
— not as they will. It was Burns's destiny, as it 
was Byron's in his turn, to be ' the passionate and 
dauntless soldier of a forlorn hope ' ; and if he fell 
in mid-assault, he found, despite the circumstances 
of his passing, the best death man can find. He 
had faults and failings not a few. But he was 
ever a leader among men; and if the manner of 
his leading were not seldom reckless, and he did 
some mischief, and gave the Fool a great deal of 
what passes for good Scripture for his folly, it will 
be found in the long-run that he led for truth — 



ROBERT BURNS 235 

the truth which ' maketh free ' ; so that the Scot- 
land he loved so well and took such pride in honour- 
ing could scarce have been the Scotland she is, had 
he not been. 



His father, William Burness (or Burnes), and his 
mother, Agnes Brown, came both of yeoman stock : 
native the one to Kincardineshire, the other to Ayr- 
shire. William Burness began life as a gardener, and 
was plying his trade in the service of one Fergusson, 
the then Provost of Ayr, when, with a view to setting 
up for himself, he took a lease of seven acres in the 
parish of Alloway, with his own hands built a two- 
roomed clay cottage — (still standing, but in use as 
a Burns Museum), — and in the December of 1757 
married Agnes Brown, his junior by eleven years. 
She was red-haired, dark-eyed, square-browed, well- 
made, and quick-tempered. He was swarthy and 
thin ; a man of strong sense, a very serious mind, 
tbe most vigilant affections, 1 and a piety not even 
tbe Calvinism in which he had been reared could ever 
make brooding and inhumane. And in the clay cot- 
tage to which he had taken his new-married wife, 
Robert, the first of seven children, was born to them 
on the 25th January 1759. 

1 In times of storm, he would seek out and stay with his 
daughter, where she was herding in the fields, because he knew 
that she was afraid of lightning; or, when it was fair, to teach 
her the names of plants and flowers. He wrote a little theo- 
logical treatise for his children's guidance, too, and was, it is 
plain, an exemplary father, and so complete a husband that there 
is record of but a single unpleasantness between him and Agnes 
his wife. 



236 ROBERT BURNS 

The Scots peasant lived hard, toiled incessantly, 
and fed so cheaply that even on high days and 
holidays his diet (as set forth in The Blithesome 
Bridal) consisted largely in preparations of meal and 
vegetables and what is technically known as ' offal.' 
But the Scots peasant was a creature of the Kirk ; the 
noblest ambition of Knox x was an active influence 
in the Kirk ; and the Parish Schools enabled the 
Kirk to provide its creatures with such teach- 
ing as it deemed desirable. Wilham Burness was 
' a very poor man ' (R. B.). But he had the 
right tradition ; he was a thinker and an observer ; 
he read whatever he could get to read ; he wrote 
English formally but with clarity ; 2 and he did 
the very best he could for his children in the 
matter of education. Robert went to school at 



1 The Reformer had a vast deal more in common with Burns 
than with the 'sour John Knox' of Browning's ridiculous verses. 
He was the man of a crisis, and a desperate one ; and he played 
his part in it like the stark and fearless opposite that he was. 
But he was a humourist, he loved his glass of wine, he ahounded 
in humanity and intelligence, he marrii d two wives, he was as 
well beloved as he was extremely hated and feared. He could 
not foresee what the collective stupidity of posterity would make 
of his teaching and example, nor how the theocracy at whose 
establishment he aimed would presently assert itself as largelv a 
system of parochial inquisitions. The minister's man who had 
looked through his keyhole would have got short shrift from him; 
and in the Eighteenth Century he had as certainly stood with 
Burns against the Kirk of Scotland, as represented by Auld and 
Russell and the like, as in the Sixteenth he stood with Moray and 
the nobles against the Church of Rome, as figured in David Bea- 
ton and the 'twa infernal monstris, Pride and Avarice.' 

2 See the aforesaid treatise: — 'A Manual of Religious Belief, in 
a Dialogue between Father and Son, compiled by William Burnes, 
farmer at Mount Oliphant, and transcribed, with grammatical cor- 
rections, by John Murdoch, teacher.' 



ROBERT BURNS 237 

six; 1 and in the May of the same year (1765) a 
lad of eighteen, one John Murdoch, was ' engaged 
by Mr. Burness and four of his neighbours to teach, 
and accordingly began to teach, the little school 
at Alloway ' : his ' five employers ' undertaking to 
board him 'by turns, and to make up a certain 
salary at the end of the year,' in the event of his 
' quarterly payments ' not amounting to a specified 
sum. He was an intelligent pedagogue — (he had 
William Burness behind him) — especially in the 
matter of grammar and rhetoric ; he trained his 
scholars to a full sense of the meaning and the 
value of words ; he even made them ' turn verse 
into its natural prose order,' and ' substitute synony- 
mous expressions for poetical words and . . . supply 
all the ellipses.' 2 One of his school-books was the 
Bible, another Masson's Collection of Prose and Verse, 
excerpted from Addison * and Steele and Dry den, 

1 ' I was a good deal noted at these years, ' says the Letter to 
Moore, ' for a retentive memory, a stubborn, sturdy something in 
my disposition, and an enthusiastic idiot-piety. ... In my infant 
and boyish days, too, I owed much to an old maid of my mother's, 
remarkable for her ignorance, credulity, and superstition,' who 
had, ' I suppose, the largest collection in the county of tales and 
songs concerning devils, ghosts, fairies, brownies, witches, war- 
locks, spunkies, kelpies, elf-candles, death-lights, wraiths, appari- 
tions, cantraips, enchauted towers, giants, dragons, and other 
trumpery. This cultivated the latent seeds of Poesy,' etc. 

2 As Robert Louis Stevenson has remarked (Some Aspects of 
Robert Burns): — 'We are surprised at the prose style of Robert; 
that of Gilbert need surprise us no less.' 

8 ' The earliest thing of composition I recollect taking pleasure 
in, was The Vision of Mirza, and a hymn of Addison's begin- 
ning, "How are thy servants blessed, Lord,"' (R. B., Letter 
to Moore). 'The first two books,' he adds, 'I ever read in private, 
and which gave me more pleasure than any two books I ever read 
again, were the Life of Hannibal and the History of Sir William 



238 ROBERT BURNS 

from Thomson and Shenstone, Mallet and Henry 
Mackenzie, with Gray's Elegy, scraps from Hume 
and Robertson, and scenes from Romeo and Juliet, 
Othello, and Hamlet. And one effect of his method 
was that Robert, according to himself, ' was abso- 
lutely a critic in substantives, verbs, and partciples,' 
and, according to Gilbert, ' soon became remarkable 
for the fluency and correctness of his expression, 
and read the few books that came in his way with 
much pleasure and improvement.' It is very char- 
acteristic of Murdoch that when, his school being 
broken up, he came to take leave of William Burness 
at Mount Oliphant, ' he brought us,' Gilbert says, 
'a present and memorial of him, a small English 
grammar and the tragedy of Titus Andronicus,' and 
that 'by way of passing the evening' he 'began to 
read the play aloud.' Not less characteristic of 
all concerned was the effect of his reading. His 
hearers melted into tears at the tale of Lavinia's 
woes, and, ' in an agony of distress,' implored him to 
read no more. Ever sensible and practical, William 
Burness remarked that, as nobody wanted to hear the 
play, Murdoch need not leave it. Robert — ever a 
sentimentalist and ever an indifferent Shakespearean, 1 

Wallace. Hannibal gave my young ideas such a turn that I used 
to strut in raptures up and down after the recruiting drum and 
bag-pipe, and wish myself tall enough that I might be a soldier; 
while the story of "Wallace poured a Scottish prejudice in my 
veins which will boil along there (sic) till the floodgates of life 
shut in eternal rest.' 

l If we may judge him from his extant work. Cf. the absurd 
line : — 

'Here Douglas forms wild Shakespeare into plan.' 

He cribs but once from Shakespeare, and the happiest among his 



ROBERT BURNS 239 

— ' Robert replied that, if it was left, he would burn 
it.' And Murdoch, ever the literary guide, philo- 
sopher, and friend, was so much affected by his 
pupil's ' sensibility,' that ' he left The School for 
Love (translated, I think, from the French) ' in 
Shakespeare's place. 1 

At this time Burns had but some two and a half 
years of Murdoch. William Burness liked and be- 
lieved in the young fellow ; for when, still urged 
by the desire to better his children's chance, he 
turned from gardening to cultivation on a larger 
scale, and took, at a £40 rental, the farm of Mount 
Oliphant, his two sons went on with Murdoch at 
Alloway, some two miles off. The school once 
broken up, however, Robert and his brother fell 

few quotations is prefixed to one of the most felicitous — and 
therefore the least publishable — of his tributes to the Light-heeled 
Muse. ' Sing me a bawdy song,' he says with Sir John Falstaff, 
'to make us merry.' And he adds this note, in which he is 
Shakespearean once again: — 'There is — there must be some 
truth in original sin. My violent propensity to b — dy convinces 
me of it. Lack a day ! If that species of composition be the special 
sin never-to-be-forgotten in this world nor in that which is to 
come, then I am the most offending soul alive. Mair for token, ' 
etc. (R. B. to Cleghorn, 25th October 1793). 

1 There is no trace of any School for Love. It is therefore 
probable that what Gilbert meant was The School for Lovers : 
'A Comedy. As it is acted at the Theatre Royal in Drury Lane. 
By William Whitehead, Esq. ; Poet Laureat. London : Printed 
for R. and J. Dodsley in Pall-Mall ; and sold by J. Hinxman, in 
Pater-noster-row. mdcclxii.' The first sentence of the author's 
Advertisement runs thus: — 'The following Comedy is formed on 
a plan of Monsieur de Fontenelle's, never intended for the stage, 
and printed in the eighth volume of his works, under the title of 
Le Testament.' The names of the chief 'persons represented' 
are Sir John Dorilant, Model}', Belmour, Lady Beverley, Caelia, 
and Araminta: an unlikely lot, one would say, for an Ayrshire 
farmstead, even though it sheltered the youthful Burns. 



240 ROBERT BURNS 

into their father's hands, and, for divers reasons, 
Gilbert says, ' we rarely saw anybody but the 
members of our own family,' so that ' my father 
was for some time the only companion we had.' 
It will scarce be argued now that this sole com- 
panionship was wholly good for a couple of lively 
boys ; but it is beyond question that it was rather 
good than bad. For, 'he conversed on all subjects 
with us familiarly, as if we had been men,' and 
further, ' was at great pains, as we accompanied him 
in the labours of the farm, to lead the conversation 
to such subjects as might tend to increase our know- 
ledge or confirm our virtuous habits.' Also, he got 
his charges books — a Geographical Grammar, a 
Physico and Astro- Theology, Stackhouse's History of 
the Bible, Ray's Wisdom of God in the Creation ; 
and these books Robert read ' with an avidity and 
industry scarcely to be equalled.' 1 None, says 
Gilbert, ' was so voluminous as to slacken his in- 
dustry or so antiquated as to damp his research ' : 
with the result that he was n't very far on in his 

i Robert's list (Lettt r to Moore) includes Guthrie and Salmon's 
Geographical Grammar; The Spectator; Pope; 'some plays 
of Shakespear' (acting editions? or odd volumes?); 'Tolland 
Dickson on Agriculture'; The Pantheon; Locke On the Human 
Understanding; Stackhouse; with 'Justice's British Gardener, 
Boyle's Lecture*, Allan Bamsay's Works, Dr. Taylor's Scripture 
Doctrine of Original Sin, A Select Collection of English Songs, 
and Harvey's Meditations.' Later he knew Thomson, Shenstone, 
Beattie, Goldsmith, Gray, Fergusson, Spenser even : with The 
Tea-Table Miscellany and many another song-book, Adam 
Smith's Theory of the Moral Sentiments, Reid's Inquiry into the 
Human Miii'l, Bunyan, Boston (The Fourfold State), Shake- 
speare, John Brown's Self-Interpreting Bible, and The Wealth of 
Nations, which last he is found reading (at Ellisland) with a 
sense of wonder that so much wit should be contained between 



ROBERT BURNS 241 

'teens ere he had ' a competent knowledge of ancient 
history,' with 'something of geography, astronomy 
and natural history.' Then, owing to the mistake of 
an uncle, who went to Ayr to buy a Ready Reckoner 
or Tradesman's Sure Gtcide, together with a Complete 
Letter- Writer, but came back with 'a collection of 
letters by the most eminent writers,' he was moved 
by ' a strong desire to excel in letter- writing.' At 
thirteen or fourteen he was sent (' week about ' 
with Gilbert) to Dalrymple Parish School to better 
his hand-writing ; ' about this time ' he fell in with 
Pamela, Fielding, Hume, Robertson, and the best of 
Smollett ; and ' about this time ' Murdoch set up as 
a schoolmaster in Ayr, and ' sent us Pope's Works 
and some other poetry, the first that we had an 
opportunity of reading, excepting what is contained 
in the English Collection and in the volume of the 
Edinburgh Magazine for 1772.' 1 The summer after 



the boards of a single book. One favourite novel was Tristram 
Shandy ; another, the once renowned, now utterly forgotten Man 
of Feeling. At Ellisland, again, he is found ordering the works of 
divers dramatists — as Jonson, Wycherley, Moliere — with a view 
to reading and writing for the stage. But you find no trace of them 
in his work; nor is there any evidence to show that he could 
ever have written a decent play, though there is plenty of proof 
that he could not. No doubt, The Jolly Beggars will be quoted 
against me here. But the essential interests of that masterpiece 
are character and description. Now, there go many more things 
to the making of a play than character, while as for description, 
the less a play contains of that the better for the play. 

i The English Collection I take to be Masson's aforesaid. At 
all events I can find no other. So far as verse is concerned, 
another exception was found in ' those Excellent new Songs that 
are hawked about the country in baskets or spread on stalls in the 
streets ' (Gr. B.). They were probably as interesting to Robert as 
Pope's Works or the poetry in The Edinburgh Magazine. At 
VOL. IV. 



242 ROBERT BURNS 

the writing-lessons at Dalrymple, Robert spent 
three weeks with Murdoch at Ayr, one over the 
English Grammar, the others over the rudiments 
of French. The latter language he was presently 
able to read, 1 for the reason that Murdoch would 
go over to Mount Oliphant on half-holidays, partly 
for Robert's sake and partly for the pleasure of 
talking with Robert's father. Thus was Robert 
schooled ; and 'tis plain that in one, and that an 
essential particular, he and his brother were ex- 
ceptionally fortunate in their father and in the 
means he took to train them. 2 

In another respect — one of eminent importance — 
their luck was nothing like so good. Mount Oli- 
phant was made up of c the poorest land in Ayr- 
shire ' ; William Burness had started it on a bor- 
rowed hundred ; he was soon in straits ; only by 
unremitting diligence and the strictest economy 
could he hope to make ends meet ; and the burden 
of hard work lay heavy on the whole family — 
heavier, as I think, on the growing lads than on 

any rate, his first essays in song were imitated from them, and 
he had the trick of them, when he listed, all his life long. 

1 Currie saw his Moliere at Dumfries. There is no question 
but he would have got on excellent well with Argan and Jourdain 
and Pourceaugnac ; but could he have found much to interest him 
in Arnolphe and Agnes, in Philinte and Alceate and Celimene? 
I doubt it. On the other hand, he would certainly have loved 
the flon-flons which Colle* wrote for the Regent's private theatre; 
and I have always regretted that he knew nothing of La Fontaine 
— especially the La Fontaine of the Conies : a Scots parallel to 
which he was exactly fitted to imagine and achieve. 

2 Robert mastered, besides, the first six books of Euclid, and 
even dabbled a little in Latin now and then: reverting to his 
rudiments (says Gilbert) when he was crossed in love, or had 
tiffed with his sweetheart. 



ROBERT BURNS 243 

the made man and woman. 'For several years,' 
says Gilbert, 'butcher's meat was a stranger to the 
house.' Robert was his father's chief hand at fifteen 
— 'for we kept no hired servant' — and could after- 
wards describe his life at this time as a combination 
of 'the cheerless gloom of a hermit with the un- 
ceasing toil of a galley-slave.' The mental wear was 
not less than the physical strain : for William Burness 
grew old and broken, and his family was seven strong, 
and of money there was as little as there seemed of 
hope. The wonder is, not that Robert afterwards 
broke out but, that Robert did not then break down : 
that he escaped with a lifelong tendency to vapours 
and melancholia, and at the time of trial itself with 
that ' dull headache ' of an evening, which ' at a future 
period . . . was exchanged,' says Gilbert, ' for a pal- 
pitation of the heart and a threatening of fainting and 
suffocation in his bed in the night-time.' William 
Burness is indeed a pathetic figure ; but to me the 
Robert of Mount Oliphant is a figure more pathetic 
still. Acquired or not, stoicism was habitual with 
the father. With the son it was not so much as 
acquired ; for in that son was latent a world of 
appetites and forces and potentialities the reverse 
of stoical. And. even had this not been: if Robert 
hadn't proved a man of genius, with the tem- 
perament which genius sometimes entails : he must 
still have been the worse for the experience. He 
lived in circumstances of unwonted harshness and 
bitterness for a lad of his degree ; with a long 
misery of anticipation, he must endure a quite un- 
natural strain on forming muscle and on nerves and 
a brain yet immature; he had perforce to face the 



244 EOBERT BURNS 

necessity of diverting an absolute example of the 
artistic temperament to laborious and squalid ends, 
and to assist in the repression of all those natural 
instincts — of sport and reverie and companionship — 
the fostering of which is for most boys, have they 
genius or have they not, an essential process of 
development ; and the experience left him with 
stooping shoulders and a heavy gait, an ineradicable 
streak of sentimentalism, what he himself calls 
'the horrors of a diseased nervous system,' and 
that very practical exultation in the joie de vivre, 
once it was known, which, while it is brilliantly 
expressed in much published and unpublished verse 
and prose, is nowhere, perhaps, so naively signified 
as In a pleasant parenthesis addressed, years after 
Mount Oliphant, to the highly respectable Thom- 
son : — ' Nothing (since a Highland wench in the 
Cowgate once bore me three bastards at a birth) has 
surprised me more than,' etc. The rest is not 
to my purpose : which is to argue that, given Robert 
Burns and the apprenticeship at Mount Oliphant, 
a violent reaction was inevitable, and that one's 
admiration for him is largely increased by the re- 
flection that it came no sooner than it did. William 
Burness knew that it must come ; for, as he lay 
dying, he confessed that it troubled him to think of 
Robert's future. This, to be sure, was not at Mount 
Oliphant : when Robert had done no worse than 
insist on going to a dancing-school : but years after, 
at Lochlie, when Robert had begun to assert himself. 
True it is that at Kirkoswald — a smuggling village, 
whither he went, at seventeen, to study mensura- 
tion, ' dialling,' and the like — he had learned, he says, 



ROBERT BURNS 245 

'to look unconcernedly on a large tavern bill and mix 
without fear in a drunken squabble.' True it is, too, 
that at Lochlie the visible reaction had set in. But, 
so far as is known, that reaction was merely formal ; 
and one may safely conjecture that, as boys are not in 
the habit of telling their fathers everything, William 
Burness knew little or nothing of those gallant hours 
at Kirkoswald. Be this as it may, he seems to 
have discerned, however dimly and vaguely, some 
features of the prodigious creature he had helped 
into the world ; and that he should not have 
discerned them till thus late is of itself enough 
to show how stern and how effectual a discipline 
Mount Oliphant had proved. 



n 

The Mount Oliphant period lasted some twelve 
years, and was at its hardest for some time ere it 
reached its term. 'About 1775 my father's gen- 
erous master died,' x says Robert ; and ' to clench 
the curse we fell into the hands of a factor, who 
sat for the picture 2 I have drawn of one in my tale 
of " Twa Dogs." . . . My father's spirit was soon 
irritated, but not easily broken. There was a free- 



i This was that Fergusson (of Ayr) in whose service William 
Burness had been at the time of his marriage with Agnes Brown, 
and (apparently) for some years after it — in fact, till he took on 
Mount Oliphant. This he did on a hundred pounds borrowed 
from his old employer ; and one may conjecture that the legal 
proceedings which Robert thus resented were entailed upon Fer- 
gusson's agents by the work of winding up the estate. 

2 'Sat for the picture I have drawn of one' is precise and 
definite enough. But surely the Factor verses in The Twa Dogs 



246 ROBERT BURNS 

dom in his lease in two years more, and to weather 
these we retrenched expenses ' — to the purpose and 
with the effect denoted ! Then came easier times. 
In 1777 William Burness removed his family to 
Lochlie, a hundred-and-thirty-acre farm, in Tar- 
bolton Parish. ' The nature of the bargain,' Robert 
wrote to Moore, ' was such as to throw a little ready 
money in his hand in the commencement,' or 'the 
affair would have been impracticable.' At this 
place, he adds, ' for four years we lived comfortably ' ; 
and at this place his gay and adventurous spirit be- 
gan to free itself, his admirable talent for talk to 
find fit opportunities for exercise and display. The 
reaction set in, as I have said, and he took life as 
gallantly as his innocency might, wore the only 
tied hair in the parish, was recognisable from afar 
by his fillemot plaid, was made a 'Free and Ac- 
cepted Mason,' 1 founded a Bachelors' Club, 2 and 

are less a picture than a record of proceedings, a note on the 
genus Factor : — 

'He '11 stamp and threaten, curse and swear, 
He '11 apprehend them, poind their gear, 
While they must stand, wi' aspect humble, 
An' hear it a', and fear and tremble.' 

The statement is accurate enough, no doubt, but where is the 
' picture ' ? Compare the effect of any one of Chaucer's Pilgrims, 
or the sketches of Caesar and Luath themselves, and the Factor as 
individual is found utterly wanting. 

i Burns was always an enthusiastic Mason. The Masonic idea 
— whatever that be — went home to him ; and in honour of tin- 
Craft he wrote some of his poorest verses. One set, the 'Adieu, 
Adieu,' etc., of the Kilmarnock Volume, was popular outside 
Scotland. At all events, I have seen a parody in a Belfast chap 
which is set to the tune of Burn's Farewell. 

2 It was, in fact, part drinking-club and part debating-society. 
But Rule X. of its constitution insisted that every member must 



ROBERT BURNS 247 

took to sweethearting with all his heart and soul 
and strength. He had hegun with a little harvester 
at fifteen ; and at Kirkoswald he had been en- 
amoured of Peggy Thomson to the point of sleepless 
nights. Now, says his brother Gilbert, ' he was 
constantly the victim of some fair enslaver' — some- 
times of two or three at a time ; and ' the symptoms 
of his passion were often such as nearly to equal 
those of the celebrated Sappho,' so that 'the agita- 
tion of his mind and body exceeded anything I 
know in real life.' Such, too, was the quality of 
what he himself was pleased to call ' un penchant 
a (sic) l'adorable inoitie' du genre humain,' in com- 
bination with that ' particular jealousy ' he had ' of 
people that were richer than himself, or who had 
more consequence in life,' that a plain face was 
quite as good as a pretty one : especially and par- 
ticularly if it belonged to a maid of a lower degree 
than his own. To condescend upon one's women — 
to some men that is an ideal. It was certainly the 
ideal of Robert Burns. ' His love,' says Gilbert, 
' rarely settled upon persons of this description ' — 
that is, persons ' who were richer than himself, or 
who had more consequence in life.' He must still 
be Jove — still stoop from Olympus to the plain. 
Apparently he held it was an honour to be admired 
by him ; and when a short while hence (1786) he 
ventured to celebrate, in rather too realistic a strain, 

have at least one love-affair on hand ; and if potations were gener- 
ally thin, and debates were often serious, there can be no question 
that the talk ran on all manner of themes, and especially on that 
one theme which men have ever found fruitful above all others. 
The club was so great a success that an offshoot was founded, by 
desire, on Robert's removal to Mossgiel. 



248 ROBERT BURNS 

the Lass of Ballochmyle, and was rebuffed for his 
impertinence — (it was so felt in those unregenerate 
days!) — he was, 'tis said, extremely mortified. In 
the meanwhile, his loves, whether plain or pretty, 
were goddesses all ; and the Sun was ' entering 
Virgo, a month which is always a carnival in my 
imagination ' the whole year round ; and the wonder 
is that he got off so little of it all in verse which 
he thought too good for the fire. Rhyme he did 
(of course), and copiously : as at this stage every 
coming male must rhyme, who has instinct enough 
to ' couple but love and dove.' But it was not till 
the end of the Lochlie years that he began rhyming 
to any purpose. Indeed, the poverty of the Lochlie 
years is scarce less ' wonderful past all whooping ' 
than the fecundity of certain memorable months at 
Mauchline : especially if it be true, as Gilbert and 
himself aver, that the Lochlie love-affairs were 
' governed by the strictest rules of modesty and 
virtue, from which he never deviated till his twenty- 
third year.' 1 For desire makes verses, and verses 



1 Saunders Tait, the Tarbolton poetaster, insists that, long 
before Mossgiel, Burns and Sillar — 'Davie, a Brother |Poet' — 
were the most incontinent youngsters in Tarbolton Parish ; and, 
after asseverating, in terms as solemn as he can make them, that 
in all Scotland 

' There 's none like you and Burns can tout 
The bawdy horn, ' 

goes on to particularise, and declares that, what with 'Moll and 
Meg, 

Jean, Sue, and Lizzey, a' decoy't, 

There 's sax wi' egg.' 

Worse than all, he indites a 'poem,' a certain B — ns in his 
Infancy, which begins thus : — 



ROBERT BURNS 249 

rather good than bad, as surely as fruition leaves 
verses, whether bad or good, unmade. 

It was natural and honourable in a young man of 
this lusty and amatorious habit to look round for a 
wife and to cast about him for a better means of 
keeping one than farm-service would afford. In 
respect of the first he found a possibility in Ellison 
Begbie, a Galston farmer's daughter, at this time a 
domestic servant, on whom he wrote (they say) his 
' Song of Similes,' and to whom he addressed some 
rather stately, not to say pedantic, documents in 
the form of love-letters. For the new line in life, 
he determined that it might, perhaps, be flax- 
dressing ; so, at the midsummer of 1781 (having 
just before been sent about his business by, as he 
might himself have said, ' le doux objet de son 
attachement ') he removed to Irvine, a little port on 
the Firth of Clyde, which was also a centre of the 
industry in which he hoped to excel. Here he 
established himself, on what terms is not known, 
with one Peacock, whom he afterwards took occa- 



'Now I must trace his pedigree, 
Because he made a song on me, 
And let the world look and see, 

Just wi' my tongue, 
How he and Clootie did agree 

When he was young ' : — 

and of which I shall quote no more. Rut Robert and his brother 
are both explicit on this point; and, despite the easy morals 
of the class in which the Rard sought now and ever 'to crown 
his flame,' it must be held, I think, as proven that he was 
deniaise by Richard Rrown at Irvine and by Rctty Paton at 
Lochlie. 

This is the place to say that I owe my quotations from 
Saunders Tait to Dr. Grosart, who told me of the copy (pro- 



250 ROBERT BURNS 

sion to describe as 'a scoundrel of the first water, 
who made money by the mystery of Thieving ' ; 1 
here he saw something more of life and character 
and the world than he had seen at Mount Oliphant 
and Lochlie ; here, at the year's end, he had a 
terrible attack of vapours (it lasted for months, he 
says, so that he shuddered to recall the time) ; 
here, above all, he formed a friendship with a 
certain Richard Brown. According to him, Brown, 
being the son of a mechanic, had taken the eye of ' a 
great man in the neighbourhood,' and had received 



bably unique) of that worthy's Poems and Songs: 'Printed for 
and Sold by the Author Only, 1796 ' : in the Mitchell Library, 
Glasgow, and at the same time communicated transcripts which 
he had made from such numbers in it as referred to Burns. As 
my collaborator, Mr. T. F. Henderson, was then in Scotland, I 
asked him to look up Tait's volume. It was found at last, after 
a prolonged search; was duly sent to the Burns Exhibition; 
and in a while was pronounced 'a discovery.' Tait, who was 
pedlar, tailor, soldier in turn, had a ribald and scurrilous tongue, 
a certain rough cleverness, and a good enough command of the 
vernacular; so that his tirades against Burns — (he was one of 
the very few who dared to attack that satirist) — are still read- 
able, apart from the interest which attaches to their theme. It 
is a pity that some Burns Club or Burns Society has not reprinted 
them in full, coarse as they are. 

t Nobody knoAvs what this may mean. It seems to be only 
Robert's lofty way of saying that Peacock swindled him. What 
follows is explicit (Letter to Moore): — ' To finish the whole, while 
we were giving a welcome carousal to the New Year, our shop, 
by the drunken carelessness of my partner's wife, took fire, and 
burned to ashes, and I was left, like a true poet, not worth 
sixpence/ How much is here of fact, how much of resentment, 
who shall say ? What is worth noting in it all is that Burns, 
despite his 'penchant ii l'adorable,' etc., is first and last a peasant 
so far as ' l'adorable moide - ' is concerned, and, for all his senti- 
mentalism, can face facts about it with all the peasant's shrewd- 
ness aud with all the peasant's cynicism. 



ROBERT BURNS 251 

' a genteel education, with a view to bettering his 
situation in life.' His patron had died, however, 
and he had had perforce to go for a sailor (he was 
afterwards captain of a West-Indiaman) . He had 
known good luck and bad, he had seen the world, 
he had the morals of his calling, at the same time 
that ' his mind was fraught with courage, independ- 
ance, and magnanimity, and every noble, manly 
virtue ' ; and Burns, who ' loved him,' and ' admired 
him,' not only ' strove to imitate him ' but also ' in 
some measure succeeded.' ' I had/ the pupil owns, 
' the pride before ' ; but Brown ' taught it to flow 
in proper channels.' Withal, Brown ' was the only 
man I ever saw who was a greater fool than myself 
when Woman was the presiding star.' Brown, how- 
ever, was a practical amorist ; and he ' spoke of a 
certain fashionable failing with levity, which hith- 
erto I had regarded with horror.' In fact, he was 
Mephisto to Burns's Faust ; x and ' here,' says the 
Bard, ' his friendship did me a mischief, and the 
consequence was, that soon after I assumed the 
plough, I wrote the enclosed Welcome.' This 
enclosure (to Moore) was that half-humorous, half- 
defiant, and wholly delightful Welcome to His Love- 
Begotten Daughter, 2 through which the spirit of the 



1 Brown denied it. 'Illicit love!' quoth he. 'Levity of a 
sailor! When I first knew Burns he had nothing to learn in that 
respect.' It is a case of word against word : and I own that I 
prefer the Bard's. 

2 ' The same cheap self-satisfaction f nds a yet uglier vent 
when he plumes himself on the scandal at the birth of his first 
bastard child.' Thus Stevenson. But Stevenson, as hath been 
said, had in him 'something of the Shorter Catechist'; and 
either he did not see, or he would not recognise, that Burns's 



252 ROBERT BURNS 

true Burns — the Burns of the good years: proud, 
generous, whole-hearted, essentially natural and 
humane — thrills from the first line to the last. 
And we have to recall the all-important fact, that 
Burns was first and last a peasant, 1 and first and 
last a peasant in revolt against the Kirk, a peasant 
resolute to be a buck, to forgive the really scandal- 
ous contrast presented in those versions of the 
affair — (versions done in the true buckish style : 
the leer and the grin and the slang in full 
blast) — which he has given in The Fornicator, the 
Epistle to John Rankine, and — apparently — the 
Reply to a Trimming Epistle from a Tailor. At 
the same time we must clearly understand that we 
recall all this for the sake of our precious selves, 
and not in any way, nor on any account, for the 
sake of Burns. He was absolutely of his station 
and his time ; the poor-living, lewd, grimy, free- 
spoken, ribald, old Scots peasant-world 3 came to 
a full, brilliant, even majestic close in his work ; 
and, if we would appreciate aright the environment 
in which he wrote, and the audience to which such 
writings were addressed, we must transliterate into 
the Vernacular Brantome and the Dames Galantes 
and Tallemant and the Historiettes. As for reading 



rejoicings in the fact of paternity were absolutely sincere through- 
out his life. 

1 Here and elsewhere the word is used, not opprobriously but, 
literally. Burns was specifically a peasant, as Byron was speci- 
fically a peer, and as Shakespeare was specifically a man of the 
burgess class. 

2 I do not, of course, forget its many solid and admirable 
virtues ; but its elements were mixed, and it was to the grosser 
that the Burns of these and other rhymes appealed. 



ROBERT BURNS 253 

them in Victorian terms — Early- Victorian terms, or 
Late — that way madness lies : madness, and a Burns 
that by no process known to gods or men could 
ever have existed save in the lubber-land of some 
Pious Editor's dream. 

At Lochlie, whither he seems to have returned 
in the March of 1782, the studious years 1 and the 
old comparative prosperity had come, or were 
coming, to a close. There had been a quarrel be- 
tween William Burness and his landlord, one M'Clure, 
a merchant in Ayr ; and this quarrel, being about 
money, duly passed into the Courts. Its circum- 
stances are obscure ; but it is history that arbitra- 
tion went against the tenant of Lochlie, that he 
was ordered to ' quite possession,' that he was 
strongly suspected of ' preparing himself accordingly 
by dispossessing of his stock and crops,' and that 
a certain ' application at present craving ' resulted, 
on shrieval authority, in the ' sequestration ' of all 
the Lochlie stock and plenishing and gear. What- 
ever the rights and wrongs of the affair, an end 
came to it with the end of William Burness. By 
this time his health was broken — he was far gone 
in what Robert calls ' a phthisical consumption ' ; 
and he died in the February of the next year 
(1784), when, as the same Robert romantically puts 
it in his fine, magniloquent fashion, ' his all went 
among the rapacious hell-hounds that growl in the 
Kennel of Justice.' 2 The fact that Robert and 



1 It was parish gossip that, if you called on William Burness at 
meal-time, you found the whole family with a book in one hand 
and a horn spoon in the other. 

2 M'Clure's 'answers 'and 'counter-answers,' together with the 
sheriff's officer's account of the seizure at Lochlie, were published 



254 ROBERT BURNS 

Gilbert were able (Martinmas 1783), when their 
father's affairs were ' drawing to a crisis,' to secure 
another farm — Mossgiel — in Mauchline Parish, some 
two or three miles off Lochlie, is enough to show 
that neither errors nor crosses, neither sequestra- 
tions nor lampoons, had impaired the family credit. 



in 

William Burness had paid his children wages during 
his tenancy of Lochlie ; and the elder four, by present- 
ing themselves as his creditors for wages due, were 
enabled to secure a certain amount of 'plenishing 

in The Glasgow Herald early in the present rear (1897). I need 
scarce say that Saunders Tait produced a Bums at Lochly, in 
which he fell on his enemy tooth and claw. His statements are 
as specific as M'Clure's, and are substantially in agreement with 
some of them, besides : — 

' To Lochly ye came like a clerk, 
And on your back was scarce a sark, 
The dogs did at your buttocks bark, 

But now ye 're bra', 
Tepouch't the rent, ye was sue stark, 
Made payment sma'.' 

In another stanza, 'M'Clure,' he says — 
' Ye scarcely left a mite 

To fill his horn. 
You and the Lawyers gied him a skyte, 
Sold a' his corn.' 
In a third he appears to record the particulars of a single combat 
between Robert and his father's landlord: — 
'His ain gun at him he did cock, 

An' never spared, 
Wi't owre his heid came a clean knock 
Maist killed the laird.' 

And in the last of all, after bitterly reproaching Robert and the 
whole Burns race with ingratitude: — 



ROBERT BURNS 255 

and gear ' wherewith to make a start at Mossgiel. It 
was a family venture, in whose success the Burnesses 
were interested all and severally, and to which each 
one looked for food and clothes and hire (the 
brothers got a yearly fee of £7 apiece) ; and, as all 
were well and thoroughly trained in farming work, 
and had never lived other than sparely, it was 
reasonable in them to believe that the enterprise 
would prosper. That it did not begin by prospering 
was no fault of Robert's. He made excellent re- 
solutions, and, what was more to the purpose, he 
kept them — for a time. He 'read farming books' 
(thus he displays himself), he ' calculated crops,' he 
' attended markets ' ; he worked hard in the fields, 



'M'Clure he put you in a farm, 
And coft you coals your a to warm 

And meal and maut. . . . 
He likewise did the mailin stock, 

And built you barns ' : — 

he sets forth explicitly this charge:-- 

' M'Clure's estate has ta'en the fever, 
And heal again it will be never, 
The vagabonds, they ca' you clever, 

Ye 're sic a sprite, 
To rive fra' him baith ga' and liver, 
And baith the feet.' 

The fact of the Laird's generosity is reaffirmed with emphasis in 
A Compliment : — 

' The horse, corn, pets, kail, kye, and ewes, 
Cheese, pease, beans, rye, wool, house and flours, 
Pots, pans, crans, tongs, bran-spits, and skewrs, 

The milk and barm, 
Each thing they had was a' M'Clure's, 

He stock'd the farm.' . . . 

And with the remark that 'Five hundred pounds they were 
behind,' the undaunted Saunders brings his libel to a close. 



256 ROBERT BURNS 

he kept his body at least in temperance and sober- 
ness, and, as for thrift, there is Gilbert's word for it, 
that his expenses never exceeded h:3 income of £7 
a year. It availed him nothing. Gilbert is said to 
have been rather a theorist than a sound practician ; 
and Robert, though a skilled farmer, cared nothing 
for business, and left him a free hand in the conduct 
of affairs. Luck, too, was against them from the 
first ; and very soon the elder's genius was revealed 
to him, and he had other than farmer's work to do. 
'In spite of the Devil,' he writes, 'the world, and 
the flesh, I believe I should have been a wise man ; 
but the first year, from unfortunately buying in bad 
seed, the second, from a late harvest, we lost half 
of both our crops.' Naturally, ' this ' (and some other 
things) 'overset all my wisdom, and I returned, 
"like the dog to his vomit " — (be it remembered, it 
is Robert Burns who speaks : not I) — " and the sow 
that was washed, to her wallowing in the mire." ' 
That the confession, with its rather swaggering 
allusion to the Armour business, was true, is plain. 
But we do not need Burns's assurance to know that, 
though he could do his work, and prided himself 
on the straightness of his furrows, he was scarce 
cut out for a successful farmer — except, it may be, 
in certain special conditions. Endurance, patience, 
diligence, a devout attention to one's own interest 
and the land's, an indomitable constancy in labour 
to certain ends and in thought on certain lines — 
these are some of the qualities which make the hus- 
bandman ; and, this being so, how should Mossgiel 
have prospered under Rab the Ranter ? His head 
was full of other things than crops and cattle. He 



ROBERT BURNS 257 

was bursting with intelligence, ideas, the conscious- 
ness of capacity, the desire to take his place among 
men ; and in Mauchline he found livelier friends 1 
and greater opportunities than he had found else- 
where. Being a Scot, he was instinctively a theo- 
logian; being himself, he was inevitably liberal- 
minded; born a peasant of genius, and therefore a 
natural rebel, he could not choose but quarrel with 
the Kirk— especially as her hand was heavy on his 
friends and himself, — and it was as a Mauchline man 
that the best of his anti-clerical work was done. 2 

1 As his landlord, the lawyer Gavin Hamilton, to whom he 
dedicated the Kilmarnock Volume, and the story of whose wrangle 
with the Mauchline Kirk-Session (see Vol. i. pp. 147-152, 188 
378-9, etc.) is to some extent that of Bums's assault upon the 
Kirk (see Vol. ii. Holy Willie's Prayer, pp. 25-30, and Notes, 
pp. 320-324). Another was Robert Aiken, also a lawyer, by 
whom he was 'read into fame,' to whom he dedicated The 
Cotter's Saturday Night, and whom he celebrated in an Epitaph 
(Vol. i. p. 188). Yet another was Richmond, the lawyer's clerk, 
whose room he was afterwards to share in Edinburgh, and who 
appears to be partly responsible for the preservation of The Jolly 
Beggars. Again, there was the Bachelors' Club, on the model of 
that he had founded at Tarbolton, for whose edification, and in 
explanation of whose function, he appears to have written The 
Fornicator and The Court of Equity. This last is Burns's idea 
of what the proceedings of the Kirk-Session ought, in certain 
cases, to have been. It is capital fun, hut something too frank 
and too particular for latter-da}' print. 

2 He was ever a theological liberal and a theological dis- 
putant—a champion of Heterodoxy, in however mild a form, 
whose disputations made him notorious, so that his name was 
as a stumbling-block and an offence to the Orthodox. For 
the series of attacks which he delivered against the Kirk— The 
Holy Fair, the Address to the Deil, The Twa Herds, The Ordina- 
tion, Holy Willie, The Kirk 's Alarm, the Epistles To the Unco 
Guid and To John Goldie—see Vols. i. and ii. (Text and Notes). 
There is no record of an appearance on the stool with Paton ; but 
the circumstances of this his initial difficulty appear to be set 

vol. rv. 



258 ROBERT BURNS 

Then, too, he was full of rhymes, and they must out 
of him : his call had come, and he fell to obeying it 
with unexampled diligence. More than all, perhaps, 
he had the temperament of the viveur — the man who 
rejoices to live his life ; and his appetites had been 
intensified, his gift of appreciation made abnormal 
(so to say), by a boyhood and an adolescence of 
singular hardship and quite exceptional continence. 
It is too late in the world's history to apologise 
for the primordial instinct ; and to do so at any 
time were sheer impertinence and unreasoning in- 
gratitude. To apologise in the case of a man who 
so exulted in its manifestations and results, and 
who so valiantly, not to say riotously, insisted on 
the fact of that exultation, as Robert Burns, were 
also a rank and frank absurdity. On this point 
he makes doubt impossible. The ' white flower 
of a blameless life ' was never a button-hole for 
him : l his utterances, published and unpublished, 

forth in the Epistle to Rankine (i. 155) and the Reply to a Trim- 
ming Epistle (ii. 96), with the Notes thereto appended. All 
these read, considered, and digested, what interest remains in 
Burns's quarrel with the Kirk consists in the fact that, being a 
person naturally and invincibly opposed to the ' sour-featured 
Whiggism' on which the Stuarts had wrecked themselves, Burns 
was naturally and invincibly a Jacobite. His Jacobitism was, he 
said, ' by way of rive la bagatelle.' He told Ramsay of Auchtertyre 
that he owed it to the plundering and unhousing (1715) of his grand- 
father, who was gardener to Earl Marischal at Inveraray. But it 
came to him mainly through Gavin Hamilton (who was Episco- 
palian by descent) and his own resentment of clerical tyranny. 
1 It is true that he wrote thus ' To a Young Friend ' : — 

' The sacred lowe o' weel-plac'd love, 

Luxuriantly indulge it ; 
But never tempt th' illicit rove, 
Tho' naething should divulge it : 



ROBERT BURNS 259 

are there to show that he would have disdained the 
presumption that it ever could have been. And it 
is from Mauchline, practically, that, his affair with 
Betty Paton over and done with, and, to anticipate 
a little, his affair with Jean Armour left hanging 
in the wind, he starts on his career as amorist at 
large. 

And now for a little narrative. In the November 
of 1784 Elizabeth Paton bore him a daughter : ' the 
First Instance,' so he wrote above his Welcome, 
' that entitled him to the Venerable Appellation of 
Father.' The mother is described as ' very plain- 
looking,' but of ' an exceedingly handsome figure ' ; 
' rude and uncultivated to a great degree,' with a 
' strong masculine understanding, and a thorough, 
though unwomanly, contempt for any sort of refine- 
ment '; withal, ' so active, honest, and independent a 
creature ' that Mrs. Burns would have had Robert 
marry her, but ' both my aunts and Uncle Gilbert 
opposed it,' in the belief that ' the faults of her 
character would soon have disgusted him.' There 
had been no promise on his part ; and though the 



I waive the quantum o' the sin, 

The hazard of concealing ; 
But, och ! it hardens a' within, 
And petrifies the feeling ! ' 
But there is plenty to show that the writer was a great deal 
better at preaching than at practice. And he owns as much him- 
self in his own epitaph :— 

' Is there a man, whose judgment clear 
Can others teach the course to steer, 
Yet runs, himself, life's mad career 

Wild as the wave ? — 
Here pause — and, thro' the starting tear, 
Survey this grave.' 



260 ROBERT BURNS 

reporter (his niece, Isabella Begg) has his own sister's 
warrant — (Mrs. Begg, by the way, was rather what 
her brother, in a mood of acute fraternal piety, 
might possibly have called ' a bletherin' b — tch ') — 
for saying that ' woman never loved man with a more 
earnest devotion than that poor woman did him,' 
he is nowise sentimentalized about her. She is 
identified with none of his songs ; and while there 
is a pleasant reference to her in the Welcome : — 

' Thy mither's person, grace, and merit ' : — 

she is recognisably the ' paitrick ' of the Epistle to 
Rankine, she is certainly the heroine of The Forni- 
cator, she probably does duty in the Reply to a 
Trimming Ephtle, none of which pieces shows the 
writer's ' penchant a 1 'adorable,' etc., to advantage. 
No doubt, they were addressed to men. No doubt, 
too, they were, first and last, satirical impeachments 
of the Kirk : impeachments tinctured with the pea- 
sant's scorn of certain existing circumstances, and 
done with all the vigour and the furia which one 
particular peasant — a peasant who could see through 
shams and was intolerant of them — could with both 
hands bestow. And that the women did not resent 
their share in such things is shown by the fact that 
such things got done. It was ' the tune of the time ' 
— in the peasant-world at least. Still, as Diderot 
says somewhere or other: — ' On aime celle a qui on 
le donne, on est aime' de celle a qui on le prend.' 
And one can't help regretting that there are few or 
none but derisive references to Betty Paton in her 
lover's work. 



ROBERT BURNS 261 



IV 

Of vastly greater importance than his mistresses, 
at this or any period of his life, is the entity, which, 
with an odd little touch of Eighteenth Century 
formality, he loved to call his Muse. That entity 
was now beginning to take shape and substance as 
a factor in the sum of the world's happiness; 
and the coming of that other entity in whose 
existence he took so high a pride and so constant 
a delight — I mean ' the Bard ' — was but a matter of 
time. Burns had been ever a rhymester ; and 
Burns, who, as Stevenson observed, and as the 
Notes to these Volumes have shown, 'was always 
ready to borrow the hint of a design, as though 
he had some difficulty in commencing,' had begun 
by borrowing his style, as well as divers hints of 
designs, from stall-artists and neighbour-cuckoos. 
But, once emancipated, once a man, once practi- 
cally assured of the primal concerns of life, once 
conscious that (after all) he might have the root 
of the matter in him, the merely local poet begins 
to waver and dislimn, and the Burns of Poor 
Mailie (written at Lochlie) and the Epistle to 
Davie reigns — intermittently, perhaps, but obviously 
— in his stead. It is all over with stall-artists 
and neighbour - cuckoos. Poor Fergusson's book 1 

i Robert Fergusson (1750-1774) was certainly a prime influence 
in Burns's poetical life. Nevertheless— or shall I say consequently? 
—he has had less than justice from the most of Burns's Editors. 
Yet in his way he was so remarkable a creature that there can 
be no question but in his death, at four-and-twenty, a great 
loss was inflicted on Scottish literature. He had intelligence 
and an eye, a right touch of humour, the gifts of invention 



262 ROBERT BURNS 

has fallen into his hands, and (as he says in his 
ridiculous way) has ' caused him to string anew his 
wildly-sounding rustic lyre with emulating vigour.' 
At last the hour of the Vernacular Muse has come ; 
and he is hip to haunch with such adepts in her 
mystery as the Sempills, and Hamilton of Gilbert- 
field, and Allan Ramsay, and Robert Fergusson, and 
the innominates whose verses, decent or not, have 
lived in his ear since childhood : catching their tone 
and their sentiment ; mastering their rhythms ; copy- 
ing their methods ; considering their effects in the 
one true language of his mind. 1 He could write 

and observation and style, together with a true feeling for 
country and city alike; and his work in the Vernacular (his 
English verse is ruhbish), with its easy expressiveness, its vivid 
and unshrinking realism, and a merit in the matter of character 
and situation which makes it — not readable only, but — interesting 
as art, at the same time that it is valuable as history, is nothing 
less than memorable: especially in view of the miserable circum- 
stances — (the poor lad was a starveling scrivener, and died, partly 
of drink, in the public madhouse) — in which it was done. Burns, 
who learned much from Fcrgusson, was an enthusiast in his 
regard for him; bared his head and shed tears over 'the green 
mound and the scattered gowans ' under which he found his ex- 
emplar lying in Canongate Churchyard; got leave from the 
managers to put up a headstone at his own cost there, and wrote 
an epitaph to be inscribed upon it, one line of which — 
'No storied urn nor animated bust,' 

is somehow to be read in Gray's Elegy in a Country Churchyard. 
FergoBBon was as essentially an Edinburgh product— (the old 
Scots capital: pay, squalid, drunken, dirt}-, lettered, venerable: 
lives in his verses much as Burns knew it twelve years after 
his death) — as the late R. L. S. himself; and, while I write, 
old memories come back to me of the admiring terms: terms 
half-playful, half-affectionate: in which the later artist was wont 
to speak of his all but forgotten ancestor. 

1 1 do not forget that Dupald Stewart noted the correctness of 
his speech and the success with which he avoided the use of 



ROBERT BURNS 263 

deliberate English, and, when he wanted to be not 
so much sincere as impressive and 'fine,' he wrote 
English deliberately, as the worse and weaker part 
of his achievement remains to prove. He could 
even write English, as Jourdain talked prose, ' with- 
out knowing it' — as we know from Scots Wha 
Hae. He read Pope, Shenstone, Beattie, Gold- 
smith, Gray, and the rest, with so much enthusiasm 
that one learned Editor has made an interesting 
little list of pilferings from the works of these dis- 
tinguished beings. But, so far as I can see, he 
might have lived and died an English-writing Scot, 
and nobody been a thrill or a memory the better 
for his work. It is true that much of the Satur- 
day Night and the Vision and the Mountain Daisy 
is written in English ; * but one may take leave to 

Scotticisms. But in his day Scots was, not an accent but, a living 
tongue; and he certainly could not have talked at Mauchline and 
at Dumfries as he did in a more or less polite and Anglified 
Edinburgh. 

1 He contrives a compromise, to admirable purpose, too, in 
Tarn o' Shanter: which is written partly in English and partly in 
the Vernacular. But (1) Tam o' Shanter is in a rhythmus classical 
in Scotland since the time of Barbour's Bruce; (2) the English 
parts of Tam o' Shanter are of no particular merit &s poetry — that 
is, 'the only words in the only order'; and (3) the best of Tam 
o' Shanter is in the Vernacular alone. Contrast, for instance, 
the diabolical fire and movement and energy of these lines: — 
'They reeled, they set, they cross'd, they cleekit, 

Till ilka carl in swat and rrckit, 

And coost her duddies to the wark, 

And linket at it in her sark ' : — 
with another famous— perhaps too famous — passage: — 
'But pleasures are like poppies spread: 

You seize the flower, its bloom is shed,' etc. 

In the second the result is merely Hudibrastic. In the first the 



264 ROBERT BURNS 

wonder if these pieces, with so much else of Burns's 
own, would have escaped the ' iniquity of Oblivion,' 
had they not chanced, to their go,;d fortune, to 
be companioned with Halloween, and Holy Willie, 
and The Farmer to His Aula 1 Mare, and a score 
of masterpieces besides, in which the Vernacular is 
carried to the highest level — in the matter of force 
and fire, and brilliancy of diction, and finality of 
effect, to name but these — it has ever reached in 
verse. 1 Let this be as it may : there can be no ques- 
tion that when Burns wrote English he wrote what, 
on his own confession, was practically a foreign 



suggestion — of mingled fury and stink and motion and heat and 
immitigable ardour — could only have been conveyed by the 
Vernacular Burns. 

1 It was Wordsworth's misfortune that, being in revolt against 
Augustan ideals and a worn-out poetic slang, he fell in with 
Burns, and sought to make himself out of common English just 
such a vocabulary as Burns's own. For he forgot that the 
Vernacular, in which his exemplar achieved such surprising and 
delectable results, had been a literary language for centuries 
when Burns began to work in it — that Burns, in fact, was 
handling with consummate skill a tool whose capacity had been 
long since proved by Ramsay and Fergusson and the greater men 
who went before them; and, having no models to copy, and no 
verbal inspiration but his own to keep him straight, he came 
to immortal grief, not once but many times. It is pretended, 
too, that in the matter of style Burns had a strong influence on 
Byron. But had he? Byron praises Burns, of course; but is 
there ever a trace of Burns the lyrist in the Byron songs ? 
Again, the Byron of Childe Harold and the tales was as it were 
a Babel in himself, and wrote Scott plus Coleridge plus Moore 
plus Beattie and Pope and the Augustan Age at large; while the 
Byron of Beppo and the Vision and Don Juan approves himself 
the master of a style of such infernal brilliancy and variety, of 
such a capacity for ranging heaven-high and hell-deep, that it 
cannot without absurdity be referred to anything except the fact 
that he also was a born great writer. 



ROBERT BURNS 265 

tongue — a tongue in which he, no more than Fergus- 
son or Ramsay, could express himself to any sufficing 
purpose ; but that, when he used the dialect which 
he had babbled in babyhood, and spoken as boy and 
youth and man — the tongue, too, in which the 
chief exemplars and the ruling influences of his 
poetical life had wrought — he at once revealed 
himself for its greatest master since Dunbar. 1 More, 
much more, than that : his bearings once found, 
he marked his use of it by the discovery of a 
quantity hitherto unknown in literature. Himself, 
to wit : the amazing compound of style and senti- 
ment with gaiety and sympathy, of wit and tender- 



i For that is what it, comes to in the end. He may seem to 
have little to do with Catholic and Feudal Scotland, and as little 
with the Scotland of the Early Reformation and the First Cove- 
nant. Also, it is now impossible to say if he knew any more of 
Scott and Dunbar and the older makers (Davie Lindsay and 
Harbour excepted) than he found in The Ever Green, which Ramsav 
garbled out of The Bannatyne MS., if he were read in Pinker- 
ton (1786), or if he got any more out of (iawain Douglas than 
the verse which serves as a motto to Tarn o' Shanter (which, 
after all, may have been found for him by some adept in 
old Scots poetry — Glenriddell or another). The Scotland he 
represents, and of which his verses are the mirror, is the Scot- 
land out of which the 'wild Whigs' had crushed the taste for 
everything but fornication and theology and such expressions 
of derision and revolt as Jenny M'Cntw and Erroch Brae : the 
Scotland whose literary beginnings date, you 'd fancy, not from 
Henryson, not from Dunbar and Douglas and the Lyon King-at- 
Arms, but from Sempill of Beltrees and the men who figure in 
the three issues of Watson's Choice Collection. But Ramsay and 
his fellows were a revival — not a new birth. The Vernacular 
School is one and indivisible. There are breaks in the effect ; 
but the tradition remains unbroken. And Burns, for all his com- 
parative modernit\ r , descends directly from, and is, in fact, the 
last of that noble line which begins with Robert Henryson. 



266 ROBERT BURNS 

ness with radiant humour and an admirahle sense 
of art, which is Robert Burns. 

He could write ill, and was capable of fustian. 
But, excepting in his ' Epigrams ' and ' Epitaphs ' 
and in his imitations of poets whose methods he did 
not understand, he was nearly always a great writer, 
and he was generally (to say the least) incapable of 
fustian in the Vernacular. In essaying the effects 
of Pope and Shenstone and those other unfamiliars, 
he was like a man with a personal hand set to 
imitate a writing-master's copy : he made as good 
a shot as he could at it, but there was none of him- 
self in the result. It was otherguess work when he 
took on the methods and the styles in which his 
countrymen had approved themselves : these he 
could compass so well that he could far surpass his 
exemplars technically, and could adequately express 
the individual Burns besides. The Death and Dying 
Words of Poor Mailie (written at Lochlie, and there- 
fore very early work) trace back to Gilbertfield's 
Bonnie Heck; but the older piece is realistic in 
purpose and brutal in effect, while in the later — to 
say nothing of the farce in Hughoc — the whole 
philosophy of life of a decent mother - ewe is 
imagined with delightful humour, and set forth in 
terms so kindly in spirit and so apt in style, that 
the Death and Dying Words is counted one of the 
imperishables in English letters. Contrast, again, 
the Elegy, written some time after the Death and 
Dying Words, on this immortal beast, with its 
exemplars in Watson and Ramsay : — 

1 He was right nacky in his way, 
An' eydent baith be night and day ; 



ROBERT BURNS 267 

He wi' the lads his part could play 

When right sair fleed, 
He gart.them good hull-sillar pay ; 

But now he ' s dead. . . .' 

' Wha '11 jow Ale on my drouthy Tongue, 
To cool the heat of Lights and Lung ? 
Wha '11 bid me, when the Kaile-bell 's rung, 

To Buird me speed ? . . . 
Wha '11 set me by the Barrel-bung ? 

Since Sauny 's dead ? . . .' 

1 He was good Company at Jeists, 
And wanton when he came to Feasts ; 
He scorn'd the Converse of great Beasts 

[F]or a Sheep's-head ; 
He leugh at Stories about Ghaists — 

Blyth Willie 's dead ' :— 

and you shall find the difference still more glaring. 
Cleverness apart — cleverness and the touch of life, 
the element of realism — the Laments for Hab Simson 
and Sanny Briggs, for John Cowper and Luckie 
Wood and the Writer Lithgow, 1 are merely squalid 
and cynical ; while in every line the Elegy, in despite 
of realism and the humorous tone and intent 



i All five, together with Ramsay's on Luckie Spence (an Edin- 
burgh bawd) and Last Words of a Wretched Miser, should be 
read for the sake of their likeness, and at the same time their 
unlikeness, to not a little in Burns, and in illustration of the truth 
that the Vernacular tradition was one of humorous, and even 
brutal realism. I have cited R. L. S. in connexion with Fergusson. 
He had a far higher esteem for that maker than he had for that 
maker's ancestor, Allan Ramsay. Yet he quoted to me one day 
a stanza from the John Cowper, a certain phrase in which — a 
phrase obscenely significant of death — was, we presently agreed, 
as good an example of 'the Squalid-Picturesque' as could be 
found out of Villon. 



268 ROBERT BURNS 

(essential to the models and therefore inevitable 
in the copy) is the work of a writer of genius, who 
is also a generous human being. 1 Very early work, 
again, are Corn Rigs and Green Grow the Rashes ; in 
suggestion, inspiration, technical quality, both are 
unalterably Scots ; and in both the effect of mastery 
and completeness is of those that defy the touch 
of Time. To compare these two and any two of 
Burns's songs in English, or pseudo-English, is to 
realise that the poet of these two should never 
have ventured outside the pale of his supremacy. 
English had ten thousand secrets which he knew 
not, nor could ever have known, except imperfectly ; 
for he recked not of those innumerable traditions, 
associations, connotations, surprises, as it were ambi- 
tions, which make up the romantic and the literary 
life of words — even as he was penetrated and 
possessed by the sense of any such elements as 
may have existed in the Vernacular. Thus, if he 
read Milton, it was largely, if not wholly, with a 
view to getting himself up as a kind of Tarbolton 
Satan. He was careless, so I must contend, of 
Shakespeare. With such knowledge as he could 
glean from song- books, he was altogether out of 
touch with the Elizabethans and the Carolines. 
Outside the Vernacular, in fact, he was a rather 



1 His suppression of such an old-fashioned touch in the first 
draft as this one : — 

' Now Robin greetan chows the hams 
Of Mailie dead' :— 

is significant. It is quite in the vein of Bonnie Heck, as indeed 
are the first four stanzas. But it would have ruined the Elegy 
as the world has known it since 1786. 



ROBERT BURNS 269 

unlettered Eighteenth Century Englishman, and 
the models which he must naturally prefer before 
all others were academic, stilted, artificial, and 
unexemplary to the highest point. It may be 
that I read the verse of Burns, and all Scots 
verse, with something of that feeling of 'precious- 
ness ' which everybody has, I take it, in reading a 
language, or a dialect, not his own : the feeling 
which blinds one to certain sorts of defect, and 
gives one an uncritical capacity for appreciating 
certain sorts of merit. However this be, I can cer- 
tainly read my mother-tongue ; and most English- 
men — with, I should imagine, many Scots — will 
agree with me in the wish that Burns, for all the 
brilliant compromise between Scots and English 
which is devised and done in Tarn o' Shanter and 
elsewhere, had never pretended to a mastery which 
assuredly he had not, nor in his conditions ever 
could have had. 

I have stressed this point because I wish to stress 
another, and with a view to making clear, and to 
setting in its proper perspective, the fact that, 
genius apart, Burns was, no miracle but, a natural 
development of circumstance and time. The fact 
is patent enough to all but them that, for a super- 
stition's sake, insist on ignoring history, and decline 
to recognise the unchanging processes of natural 
and social Law. Without the achievement of 
iEschylus, there can be no such perfection as 
Sophocles : just as, that perfection achieved, the 
decline of Tragedy, as in Euripides, is but a matter 
of time. But for the Middle Ages and the reaction 
against the Middle Ages there could have been 



270 ROBERT BURNS 

no Ronsard, no Rabelais, no Montaigne in France. 
Had there been no Surrey and no Marlowe, no 
Chaucer and no Ovid (to name no more than 
these in a hundred influences), who shall take on 
himself to say the shape in which we now should 
be privileged to regard the greatest artist that ever 
expressed himself in speech ? It is in all depart- 
ments of human energy as in the eternal round of 
nature. There can be no birth where there is no 
preparation. The sower must take his seedsheet, 
and go afield into ground prepared for his minis- 
trations ; or there can be no harvest. The Poet 
springs from a compost of ideals and experiences 
and achievements, whose essences he absorbs 
and assimilates, and in whose absence he could 
not be the Poet. This is especially true of Burns. 
He was the last of a school. It culminated in 
him, because he had more genius, and genius of 
a finer, a rarer, and a more generous quality, 
than all his immediate ancestors put together. 
But he cannot fairly be said to have contributed 
anything to it except himself. He invented none 
of its forms ; its spirit was none of his origi- 
nating ; its ideals and standards of perfection were 
discovered, and partly realised, by other men ; and 
he had a certain timidity, as it were a faineant isc, 
in conception — a kind of unreadiness in initiative — 
which makes him more largely dependent upon 
his exemplars than any great poet has ever been. 
Not only does he take whatever the Vernacular 
School can give in such matters as tone, senti- 
ment, method, diction, phrase ; but also, he is 
content to run in debt to it for suggestions as 



ROBERT BURNS 271 

regards ideas and for models in style. Hamilton 
of Gilbertfield and Allan Ramsay conventionalise 
the Rhymed Epistle ; and he accepts the conven- 
tion as it left their hands, and produces epistles 
in rhyme which are glorified Hamilton-Ramsay. 
Fergusson writes Caller Water, and Leith Races, 
and The Farmer's Ingle, and Planestanes and Causey, 
and the Ode to the Gowdspink-, and he follows 
suit with Scotch Drink, and the Saturday Night, 
and The Holy Fair, and The Brigs of Ayr, and 
the Mouse and the Mountain Daisy. Sempill of 
Beltrees starts a tradition with The Piper of Kil- 
barchan; and his effect is plain in the elegies 
on Tam Samson and Poor Mailie. Ramsay sees 
a Vision, and tinkers old, indecent songs, and 
writes comic tales in glib octo-syllabics ; and in- 
stinctively and naturally Burns does all three. It 
is as though some touch of rivalry were needed 
to put him on his mettle : 1 as though, instead of 
writing and caring for himself alone — (as Keats and 
Byron did, and Shelley : new men all, and founders 
of dynasties, not final expressions of sovranty) — to 
be himself he must still be emulous of some one 



l It was with 'emulating vigour' that he strung his 'wildly- 
sounding rustic lyre ' ; and he read Ramsay and Fergusson not 
'for servile imitation' but 'to kindle at their flame.' Another 
instance, or rather another suggestion, from himself, and I have 
done. It 'exalted,' it 'enraptured' him 'to walk in the sheltered 
side of a wood, or high plantation, in a cloudy winter day,' and 
hear the wind roaring in the trees. Then was his 'best season for 
devotion,' for then was his mind ' rapt up in a kind of enthusiasm to 
Him who ..." walks on the wings of the wind." ' The ' rapture ' 
and the 'exaltation' are but dimly and vaguely reflected in his 
Winter. But if some ancestor had tried to express a kindred 
feeling, then had Winter been a masterpiece. 



272 ROBERT BURNS 

else. This is not written as a reproach : it is 
stated as a fact. On the strength of that fact 
one cannot choose but abate the old, fantastic 
estimate of Burns's originality. But originality (to 
which, by the way, he laid no claim) is but one 
element in the intricately formed and subtly 
ordered plexus, which is called genius ; and I 
do not know that we need think any the less 
of Burns for that it is not predominant in him. 
Original or not, he had the Vernacular and its 
methods at his fingers' ends. He wrote the heroic 
couplet (on the Dryden-Pope convention) clumsily, 
and without the faintest idea of what it had been in 
Marlowe's hands, without the dimmest foreshadow- 
ing of what it was presently to be in Keats's ; he had 
no skill in what is called ' blank verse ' — by which I 
mean the metre in which Shakespeare triumphed, and 
Milton after Shakespeare, and Thomson and Cowper, 
each according to his lights, after Shakespeare and 
Milton ; he was a kind of hob-nailed Gray in his use 
of choric strophes and in his apprehension of the 
ode. But he entered into the possession of such 
artful and difficult stanzas as that of Montgomerie's 
Banks of Helicon and his own favourite sextain as 
an heir upon the ownership of an estate which he 
has known in all its details since he could know 
anything. It was fortunate for him and for his 
book, as it was fortunate for the world at large — as, 
too, it was afterwards to be fortunate for Scots 
song — that he was thus imitative in kind and thus 
traditional in practice. He had the sole ear of the 
Vernacular Muse ; there was not a tool in her 
budget of which he was not master ; and he took 



ROBERT BURNS 273 

his place, the moment he moved for it, not so 
much, perhaps, by reason of his uncommon capa- 
city 1 as, because he discovered himself to his 
public in the very terms — of diction, form, style, 
sentiment even — with which that public was fa- 
miliar from of old, and in which it was waiting 
and longing to be addressed. 

It was at Mossgiel that the enormous possibilities 
in Burns were revealed to Burns himself; and it 
was at Mossgiel that he did nearly all his best and 
strongest work. The revelation once made, he stayed 
not in his course, but wrote masterpiece after master- 
piece, with a rapidity, an assurance, a command of 
means, a brilliancy of effect, which make his achieve- 
ment one of the most remarkable in English letters. 
To them that can rejoice in the Vernacular his very 
titles are enough to recall a little special world of 
variety and character and delight : the world, in 
fact, where you can take your choice among lyrical 
gems like Corn Rigs and Gh'een Grow the Rashes and 
Mary Morison and masterpieces of satire like Holy 
Willie and the Address to the Unco Guid. To this time 
belong The Jolly Beggars and Halloween and The 
Holy Fair ; to this time the Louse and the Mouse, 
the Atdd Mare and the Twa Dogs ; to this time, 



1 In the same way Byron sold four or five editions of the English 
Bards, because it was written on a convention which was as old 
as Bishop Hall, and had been used bj r every satirist from the time 
of that master down to Matthias and Gifford. If he had cast his 
libellus into the octaves of Don Juan, the strong presumption 
is that it would have fallen still-born from the press. Other 
cases in point are Blake, Wordsworth, Shelley, Keats, and 
Browning: the manner of each was new, and not all have reached 
the general yet. 

vol. rv. 



274 ROBERT BURNS 

Scotch Drink and the Address to the Deil, the Earnest 
Cry and the Mountain Daisy, the Epistles to Smith 
and Rankine and Sillar and Lapraik, the Elegies on 
Tarn Samson and the never-to-be-forgotten Mailie, 
the Reply to a Tailor and the Welcome and the Satur- 
day Night. In some, as The Ordination, The Holy 
Tulyie, and, despite an unrivalled and inimitable 
picture of drunkenness, Hornbook itself, with others 
in a greater or less degree, the interest, once you 
have appreciated the technical quality as it deserves, 
is very largely local and particular. 1 In others, 
as the Saturday Night and The Vision (after the 
first stanzas of description), it is also very largely 
sentimental ; and in both these it is further 
vitiated by the writer's 'falling to his English,' 
to a purpose not exhilarating to the knower of 
Shakespeare and Milton and Herrick. But all 
this notwithstanding, and notwithstanding quite a 
little crowd of careless rhymes, the level of excel- 
lence is one that none but the born great writer 
can maintain. Bold, graphic, variable, expressive, 
packed with observations and ideas, the phrases go 
ringing and glittering on through verse after verse, 
through stave after stave, through poem after poem, 
in a way that makes the reading of this peasant a 



i There is a sense in which the most are local — are parochial even. 
In Holy Willie itself the type is not merely the Scots Calvinistic 
pharisee : it is a particular expression of that type ; the thing is a 
local satire introducing the ' kail and potatoes ' of a local scandal. 
Take, too, The Holy Fair: the circumstances, the manners, the 
characters, the experience — all are local. Apply the test to 
almost an}' — not forgetting the Tain o' Shunter which is the top 
of Burns's achievement — and the result is the same. 



ROBERT BURNS 275 

peculiar pleasure for the student of style. 1 And 
if, with an eye for words and effects in words, that 
student have also the faculty of laughter, then are 
his admiration and his pleasure multiplied ten-fold. 
For the master-quality of Burns, the quality which 
has gone, and will ever go, the furthest to make him 
universally and perennially acceptable — acceptable 
in Melbourne (say) a hundred years hence as in 
Mauchline a hundred years syne — is humour. His 
sentiment is sometimes strained, obvious, and de- 
liberate — as might be expected of the poet who 
foundered two pocket-copies of that very silly 
and disgusting book, The Man of Feeling ; and it 



1 It is not, remember, for 'the love of lovely words,' not for 
such perfections of human utterance as abound in Shakespeare: — 

' Gilding pale streams with heavenly alchemy ' : — 
in Milton: — 

' Now to the moon in wavering morrice move ' : — 
in Keats: — 

' And hides the green hill in an April shroud' : — 
in Herrick: — 

' Ye have been fresh and green, 

Ye have been filled with flowers, 
And ye the walks have been 
Where maids have spent their hours ' : — 

that we revert to Burns. Felicities he has — felicities innumer- 
able ; but his forebears set themselves to be humorous, racy, 
natural, and he could not choose but follow their lead. The 
Colloquial triumphs in his verse as nowhere outside the Vision 
and Don Juan; but for Beauty we must go elsewhither. He has 
all manner of qualities : wit, fancy, vision of a kind, nature, gaiety, 
the richest humour, a sort of homespun verbal magic. But, if we 
be in quest of Beauty, we must e'en ignore him, and 'fall to our 
English ' : of whose secrets, as I 've said, he never so much as 
suspected the existence, and whose supreme capacities were sealed 
from him until the end. 



276 ROBERT BURNS 

often rings a little false, as in much of the Saturday 
Night. But his humour — broad, rich, prevailing, 
now lascivious or gargantuan and now fanciful 
or jocose, now satirical and brutal and now in- 
stinct with sympathy, is ever irresistible. Holy 
Willie is much more vigorously alive in London, 
and Melbourne, and Cape Town to-day than poor 
drunken old Will Fisher was in the Mauchline of 
1785. That ' pagan full of pride,' the vigilant, tricksy, 
truculent, familiar, true-blue Devil lives ever in 
Burns's part pitying and fanciful, part humorous 
and controversial presentment ; but he has long 
since faded out of his strongholds in the Kirk: — 

' But fare-you-weel, Auld Nickie-Ben ! 
O, wad ye tak' a thought an' men' ! 
Ye aiblins might — I dinna ken — 

Still hae a stake : 
I 'm wae to think upo' yon den, 

Ev'n for your sake ! ' 

Lockhart, ever the true Son of the Manse, was so 
misguided — so mansified, to coin a word — as to wish 
that Burns had written a Holy Fair in the spirit and 
to the purpose of The Cotter's Saturday Night. But 
the bright, distinguishing qualities of The Holy Fair 
are humour and experience and sincerity ; the 
intent of the Saturday Night is idyllic and senti- 
mental, as its effect is laboured and unreal ; and I, 
for my part, would not give my Holy Fair, still 
less my Halloween or my Jolly Beggars — observed, 
selected, excellently reported — for a wilderness of 
Saturday Nights. It is not hard to understand that 
(given the prestance of its author) the Saturday Night 



ROBERT BURNS 277 

was doomed to popularity from the first ; ' being of 
its essence sentimental and therefore pleasingly un- 
true, and being, also of its essence, patriotic — an 
assertion of the honour and the glory and the piety 
of Scotland. But that any one with an eye for fact 
and an ear for verse should prefer its tenuity of 
inspiration and its poverty of rhythm and diction 
before the sincere and abounding humour and the 
notable mastery of means, before the plenitude of 
life and the complete accord of design and effect, 
by which Halloween and The Holy Fair, and nine- 
tenths of the early pieces in the Vernacular are 
distinguished, appears inexplicable. In these Burns 
is an artist and a poet: in the Saturday Night he 
is neither one nor other. In these, and in Tarn o' 
Shanter, the Scots School culminates: as English 
Drama, with lyrical and elegiac English, culminates 
in Othello and the Sonnets, in Antony and Cleopatra 
and the Adonis and The Rape of Lucrece: more 
gloriously far than the world would ever have 
wagered on its beginnings. It is the most indi- 
vidual asset in the heritage bequeathed by 'the 
Bard'; and still more, perhaps, 2 than the Songs, 

i And such popularity! 'Poosie Nancy's '—(thus writes a 
frieud, even as these sheets are passing through the press)— 'or 
rather a house on the site of Poosie Nancy's, is, as you know, 
still a tavern. There is a large room (for parties) at the back. 
And what, think you, is the poem that, printed and framed and 
glazed, is hung in the place of honour on its walls? " The Jolly 
Beggars— naturally?" Not a bit of it. The Cotter's Saturday 
Night ! Surrounded, too, by engravings depicting its choicest 
moments and its most affecting scenes.' 

2 I say, 'perhaps,' because Burns, among the general at least, 
is better sung than read. But if the Songs, his own and those 
which are effects of a collaboration, be the more national, the 



278 ROBERT BURNS 

it stamps and keeps him the National Poet. The 
world it pictures — the world of ' Scotch morals, 
Scotch Religion, and Scotch drink ' — may be ugly 
or not (as refracted through his temperament, 
it is not). Ugly or not, however, it was the world 
of Burns ; to paint it was part of his mission ; it 
lives for us in his pictures ; and many such attempts 
at reconstruction as The Earthly Paradise and The 
Idylls of the King will ' fade far away, dissolve,' and 
be quite forgotten, ere these pictures disfeature or 
dislimn. He had the good sense to concern himself 
with the life he knew. The way of realism 1 lay 



Poems are the greater, and it is chiefly to the Poems that Burns 
is indebted for his place in literature. 

1 It is claimed for him, with perfect truth, that he went straight 
to Nature. But the Vernacular makers seldom did anything else. 
An intense and abiding consciousness of the common circum- 
stances of life was ever the distinguishing note of Scots Poetry. 
It thrills through Henryson, through Dunbar and the Douglas of 
certain 'Prolougs' to Eneados, through Lindsay and Scott, 
through the nameless lyrist of Peeblis at the Play and Christ's 
Kirk on the Green, through much of The Bannatyne MS., the 
Sempill of the Tulchene Bischope, the Montgomerie of the 
Flyting with Polwarth and of certain sonnets: — 

'Raw reid herring reistit in the reik.' 

It is even audible in the Guid and Godlie Ballats; and after the 
silence it is heard anew in the verse which was made despite the 
Kirk, and in the verse which proceeded from that verse — the 
verse, that is, of Ramsay and Fergusson and Burns. This vivid 
and curious interest in facts is, as I think, a characteristic of the 
'perfervid ingyne.' Compare, for instance, Pitscottie and Knox 
on the murder of Cardinal Beaton. The one is something naive, 
the other as it were Shakespearean; but in both the element 
of particularity is vital to the complete effect. These are two 
instances only; but I could easily give two hundred. (See post 
p. 323, Note 1.) To return to Burns and his treatment of 
weather (say) and landscape. His verse is full of realities: — 



ROBERT BURNS 279 

broadly beaten by his ancestors, and was natural to 
his feet ; he followed it with vision, with humour, 
with ' inspiration and sympathy,' and with art ; 
and in the sequel he is found to be one in the 
first flight of English poets after Milton, Chaucer, 
Shakespeare. 



I take it that Burns was not more multifarious in 
his loves than most others in whom the primordial 
instinct is of peculiar strength. But it was written 
that English literature — the literature of Chaucer, 
Shakespeare, Fielding — should be turned into a 
kind of schoolgirls' playground ; so that careful 
Editors have done their best to make him even as 
themselves, and to fit him with a suit of practical 
and literary morals, which, if his own verse and 
prose mean anything, he would have refused, with 
all the contumely of which his ' Carrick lips ' were 



' When lyart leaves bestrew the yird, 
Or, wavering like the bauckie-bird, 

Bedim eauld Boreas' blast; 
When hailstanes drive wi' bitter skyte. . . .' 
The burn stealing under the long j^ellow broom : — 

' When, tumbling brown, the burn comes down. . . .' 
' The speedy gleams the darkness swallowed. . . .' 
'Yon murky cloud is foul with rain. . . .' 
' November chill blaws loud wi' angry sugh ' : — 

all exactly noted and vividly recorded (a most instructive instance 
is the 'burnie' stanza in Halloween; for he had, they say, a 
peculiar delight in running water). But for great, imaginative 
impressions: — 

1 Those green-robed senators of mighty woods, 
Tall oaks branch-charmed by the earnest stars ' : — 
vou turn to other books than his. 



280 ROBERT BURNS 

capable, to wear. Nothing has exercised their in- 
genuity, their talent for chronology, their capacity 
for invention (even), so vigorously rs the task of 
squaring their theory of Burns with the story of 
his marriage and the legend of his Highland Lassie. 
And now is the moment to deal with both. 

Elizabeth Paton's child was born in the November 
of 1784. In the April of that year, a few weeks 
after the general settlement at Mossgiel, he made 
the acquaintance of Armour the mason's daughter, 
Jean. She was a handsome, lively girl ; the ac- 
quaintance ripened into love on both sides ; and 
in the end, after what dates approve a prolonged 
and serious courtship, Armour fell with child. 
Her condition being discovered, Burns, after some 
strong revulsions of feeling against — not Jean, I 
hope, but — the estate of marriage, gave her what 
he presently had every reason to call ' an unlucky 
paper,' recognising her as his wife ; and, had things 
been allowed to drift in the usual way, the world 
had lacked an unforgotten scandal and a great 
deal of silly writing. This, though, was not to be. 
Old Armour — (' a bit mason body, who used to 
snuff a guid deal, and gey af 'en tak' a bit dram ') 
— is said to have ' hated ' Burns : so that he would 
' reyther hae seen the Deil himsel' comin' to the 
boose to coort his dochter than him.' Thus a 
contemporary of both Armour and Burns ; and in 
any case Armour knew Burns for a needy and reck- 
less man, the father of one by-blow, a rebel at 
odds with the Orthodox, of whom, in existing 
circumstances, it would be vain to ask a comfort- 
able living. So he first obliged Jean to give up 



ROBERT BURNS 281 

the 'unlucky paper,' with a view to unmaking any 
engagement it might confirm, 1 and then sent her 
to Paisley, to be out of her lover's way. In the 
meanwhile Burns himself was in straits, and had 
half-a-dozen designs in hand at once. Mossgiel 
was a failure ; he had resolved to deport him- 
self to the West Indies ; he had made up his 
mind to print, and the Kilmarnock Edition was 
setting, when Jean was sent into exile. Worst of 
all, he seems to have been not very sure whether 
he loved or not. When he knew that he and she 
had not eluded the Inevitable, he wrote to James 
Smith that 'against two things — staying at home 
and owning her conjugally ' — he was ' fixed as fate.' 
' The first,' he says, ' by heaven I will not do !' Then, 
in a burst of Don-Juanism — Don-Juanism of the 
kind that protests too much to be real — ' the last, 
by hell I will never do.' Follows a gush of senti- 
mentalism (to Smith), which is part nerves and part 
an attempt — as the run on the g's and the tv's shows 
— at literature : — ' A good God bless you, and make 
you happy up to the warmest weeping wish of part- 
ing friendship.' And this is succeeded by a message 
to the poor, pregnant creature, of whom, but two 
lines before, he has sworn ' by hell ' that he will 
never make her honest : — ' If you see Jean, tell her 

1 I take it that the paper was 'unlucky,' because it, became a 
weapon in old Armour's hands, and was the means of inflicting on 
the writer the worst and the most painful experience of his life. 
At the same time there seems to be no doubt that it made Jean 
Mrs. Burns, so that, consciously or not, Auld (who probably had 
a strong objection to the marriage) was guilty of an illegal act in 
certifying Burns a bachelor. Burns, in fact, was completely 
justified in his anger with the Kirk and in the scorn with which 
he visited the tyranny of her ministers. 



282 ROBERT BURNS 

I will meet her, so help me God in my hour of 
need.' This scrap is undated, but it must have 
been written before 17th February 1786, when he 
wrote thus to Richmond : — ' I am extremely happy 
with Smith; he is the only friend I have now in 
Mauchline.' Well, he does meet Jean ; and, his better 
nature getting the upper hand, the ■ unlucky paper ' 
is written. Then on the 20th March he writes 
thus to Muir : — • I intend to have a gill between us 
or a mutchkin stoup, ' for the reason that it • will 
be a great comfort and consolation ': — which seems to 
show that Jean has repudiated him some time be- 
tween the two letters. Before the 2nd April, on 
which day the Kirk-Session takes cognisance of the 
matter, Jean has gone to Paisley ; the ' unlucky 
paper ' is cancelled (apparently about the 14th 
April, the names were cut out with a penknife) ; 
so that Don Juan finds himself plante-lh, and being 
not really Don Juan — (as what sentimentalist could 
be ?) — he does not affect Don Juan any more. The 
prey has turned upon the hunter; the deserter 
becomes the deserted, the privilege of repudiation, 
' by hell ' or otherwise, has passed to the other 
side. The man's pride, inordinate for a peasant, 
is cut to the quick ; and his unrivalled capacity 
for ' battering himself into an affection ' or a mood 
has a really notable opportunity for display. In 
love before, he is ten times more in love than ever; 
he feels his loss to desperation ; he becomes the 
disappointed lover — even the true-souled, generous, 
adoring victim of a jilt : — 

' A jillet brak his heart at last 
That 's owre the sea.' 



ROBERT BURNS 283 

In effect, his position was sufficiently distracting. 
He had made oath that he would not marry Jean ; 
then he had practically married her ; then he found 
that nobody wanted her married to him — that, on 
the contraiy, he was the most absolute ' detrimental ' 
in all Ayrshire ; when, of course, the marriage be- 
came the one tiling that made his life worth living. 
He tried to persuade old Armour to think better of 
his resolve ; and, failing, ran ' nine parts and nine 
tenths out of ten stark staring mad.' Also he 
wrote the Lament, in which he told his sorrows to 
the moon 1 (duly addressing that satellite as ' O 
thou pale Orb '), and took her publicly into his 
confidence, in the beautiful language of Eighteenth 
Century English Poetry, and painted what is in the 
circumstances a really creditable picture of the 
effects upon a simple Bard of ' a faithless woman's 
broken vow.' Further, he produced Despondency in 
the same elegant lingo ; and, in Despondency, having 
called for ' the closing tomb,' and pleasingly praised 
' the Solitary's lot,' — 

'Who, all-forgetting, all-forgot, 

Within his humble cell — 
The cavern, wild with tangling roots — 
Sits o'er his newly gather'd fruits, 

Beside his crystal well ! ' etc. — 

he addressed himself to Youth and Infancy in these 
affecting terms : — 



1 Is it worth noting that, later, when he comes to sing of 
Mary Campbell, his confidant is no longer the Moon but the 
Morning Star ? 



284 ROBERT BURNS 

* O enviable early days, 
When dancing thoughtless pleasure's maze, 

To care, to guilt unknown ! 
How ill exchang'd for riper times, 
To feel the follies or the crimes 

Of others, or my own ! 
Ye tiny elves that guiltless sport, 

Like linnets iu the bush, 
Ye little know the ills ye court, 
When manhood is your wish ! 
The losses, the crosses 

That active man engage ; 
The fears all, the tears all 
Of dim declining Age ! ' 1 

Moreover, he took occasion to refer to Jean (to 
David Brice ; 12th June 1786) as ' poor, ill-advised, 
ungrateful Armour ' ; vowed that he could • have 
no nearer idea of the place of eternal punishment ' 
than ' what I have felt in my own breast on her 

i I cannot attach any great importance to these exercises in 
Poetic English. Hums wrote to a very different purpose when 
he wrote from his heart and in his native tongrfe : — 

' Had we never loved MB kindly . . . ' 
• < H a' the airts the wind can Idaw 
I dearly like the west ' : — 

and so on, and so on. Still, there can lie no doubt that they 
mean something. At any rate they are designed to he impressive 
and 'fine' : and probably the Bard believed in them to the extenl 
to which he was satisfied with his achievement in what must cer- 
tainly have seemed tu him real poetry. None of your Vernacular 
(that is), but downright, solid, unmistakable English Verse I verse 
which might stand beside the works of Beattie and Shenstone ami 
Thomson and the 'elegantly melting Gray.' That life departed 
them long since is plain. But it is just as plain that they meant 
something to Burns, for (apparently) he took much pains with 
them, saw not their humorous aspect, and included them in his 
first (Kilmarnock) Volume. 



ROBERT BURNS 285 

account'; and finally confessed himself to this pur- 
pose : — ' I have tried often to forget her : I have run 
into all kinds of dissipation and riot ... to drive her 
out of my head, but all in vain.' Long before this, 
however — as early, it would seem, as some time in 
March — his 'maddening passions, roused to tenfold 
fury,' having done all sorts of dreadful things, and 
then ' sunk into a lurid calm,' he had ' subsided into 
the time-settled sorrow of the sable widower,' and 
had lifted his 'grief-worn eye to look for— another 
wife.' In other words, he had pined for female 
society, and had embarked upon those famous love- 
passages with Highland Mary. 

Little that is positive is known of Mary Campbell 
except that she once possessed a copy of the 
Scriptures (now very piously preserved at Ayr), and 
that she is the subject of a fantasy, in bronze, 
at Dunoon. But to consider her story is, almost 
inevitably, to be forced back upon one of two 
conclusions :— either (1) she was something of a 
lightskirts ; or (2) she is a kind of Scottish Mrs. 
Harris. The theory in general acceptance — what 
is called the Episode Theory— is that she was 'an 
innocent and gentle Highland nursery-maid' (thus, 
after Chambers, R. L. S.) ' in the service of a neigh- 
bouring family' (Gavin Hamilton's); that she con- 
soled Burns — metis pour le bon motif— for Jean's de- 
sertion ; that they agreed to marry; that, on her 
departure for the West to prepare for the event, 
'Ayr, gurgling, kissed his pebbled shore,' and they 
exchanged vows and Bibles ; and that she died, of a 
malignant fever, some few months after her return to 
Greenock. Another identifies her (on Richmond's 



286 ROBERT BURNS 

authority) with a serving-maid in Mauchline, who 
was the mistress of a Montgomerie, and had withal 
such a hold upon Burns that for a brief while he was 
crazy to make her his wife ; and some have thought 
that this may be the Mary Campbell who, according 
to the Dundonald Session Records, fathered a child 
on one John Hay. This last hypothesis is, of course, 
most hateful to the puzzle-headed puritans who can- 
not, or will not, believe, despite the fact that the 
world has always teemed with Antonies, each of 
them mad for his peculiar Cleopatra, that Burns, 
particularly in his present straits, might very well 
have been enamoured of a gay girl to the point of 
marriage. So, for the consolation of these, there 
has been devised a third, according to which her 
name was either Mary Campbell or something un- 
known ; but, whatever she was called, she was so 
far and away the purest and sweetest of her sex 
— the one ' white rose,' in fact, which grew up 
among • the passion flowers ' of the Bard's career 
— that she must, had she married him, have en- 
tirely ' rectified ' his character, and have trans- 
formed him into a pattern Kirk-of-Scotland puritan 
of the puritans. On the other hand, it has be- 
come obvious to some whole-hearted devotees of 
the Marian Ideal that a ' young person ' of this sort 
could scarce have been of so coming a habit as 
to skip with alacrity into Jean's old shoes, and — 
shutting her innocent eyes to the fact that Burns, 
a man notoriously at war with the Kirk and the 
seducer of two unmarried women, was at the same 
time at his wits' end for cash — consent to cast in 
her lot with his at a moment's notice and with 



ROBERT BURNS 287 

never a sign from the family she was to enter. If 
she could do that, plainly she could not, except on 
strong positive testimony, be made to do duty as a 
white rose among passion-flowers ; or if, on some 
unknown and inenarrable hypothesis, she could, 
then, says one of the devout, 'the conduct of Burns 
was that of a scoundrel.' This is absurd ! So of 
late (1896-97) there has come into being a wish 
to believe that either Mary Campbell preceded 
Armour in the Bard's affections, or the Highland 
Lassie never existed at all, but was a creature of 
Burns's brain : an ideal of womanhood to which his 
thought ascended from the mire of this world — (the 
world of Ellisland, and Jean, and the children, and 
the songs in Johnson's Museum) — as Dante's to his 
Beatrice of dream. Given Burns's own habit and 
the habit of the Scots peasant woman, there is 
still no earthly reason for rejecting the Episode 
Theory — even were rejection possible — however seri- 
ously it reflects upon the morals of the parties con- 
cerned. But it is fair to add that the subject is both 
complicated and obscure. Burns's own references 
to his Highland Lassie are deliberately insignificant 
and vague : for once in his life he was reticent. His 
statement that she went home to prepare for their 
marriage is heavily discounted by the fact that he did 
not introduce her to his family as his betrothed, in 
nowise prepared for marriage on his own account, 
never dreamed, except in sporadic copies of verse, 
of taking her to the West Indies, and was all the 
while so desperately enamoured of Jean that not 
by any amount oi self-indulgence could he rid his 
breast of her : by the fact, too, that, if his thought 



288 ROBERT BURNS 

went back to the Highland Lassie in after years, his 
report of the journey is strongly tinctured with 
remorse. 1 Currie's statement is that ' the banks of 
Ayr formed the scene of youthful passions . . . the 
history of which it would be improper to reveal,' etc. 
Gilbert Burns, after noting that Nanie Fleming's 
charms were ' sexual ' — ' which indeed was the 
characteristic of the greater part of his (Robert's) 
mistresses ' — is careful, perhaps with an eye on the 
heroine of Thou Ling'ring Star, to record the state- 
ment that Robert, at least, 'was no platonic lover, 
whatever he might pretend or suppose of himself to 
the contrary.' There is Richmond's statement, as 
reported by Train. There is the Mary Campbell of 
the Dundonald Register. There is the certainty 
that relations there were between Burns and a Mary 
Campbell. There is the strong probability that Mary 
Campbell and the Highland Lassie were one and 
the same person. There is Burns's own witness to 
the circumstance that they met and parted under 
extremely suspicious conditions. That, really, is 
all. Yet, on the strength of a romantic impulse on 
the part of Robert Chambers, the heroine-in-chief 
of Burns's story is not the loyal and patient soul 
whom he appreciated as the fittest to be his wife 
he 'd ever met : not the Jean who endured his 
affronts, and mothered his children (her own and 
another's), and took the rough and the smooth, 

1 He sent Thou Ling'ring Star to Mrs. Dunlop in a letter 
dated 8th November 1789. In acknowledging it, the lady noted 
its remorseful cast, ami doped it didn't set forth a personal ex- 
perience. There is nothing to show that be gave ber any par- 
ticulars, or essayed to disabuse her of the idea that remorse there 
well might be. 



ROBERT BURNS 289 

the best and the worst of life with him, and wore 
his name for well-nigh forty years after his death 
as her sole title to regard. On the contrary, that 
heroine-in-chief is a girl of whom scarce anything 
definite is known, while what may be reasonably 
suspected of her, though natural and feminine 
enough, is so displeasing to some fanatics, that, for 
Burns's sake (not hers) they would like to mytho- 
logise her out of being ; or, at the least, to make 
her as arrant an impossibility as the tame, proper, 
figmentary Burns, the coinage of their own tame, 
proper brains, which they have done their best to 
substitute for the lewd, amazing peasant of genius, 1 
the inspired faun, whose voice has gone ringing 
through the courts of Time these hundred years 
and more, and is far louder and far clearer now than 
when it first broke on the ear of man. 

Stevenson was an acute and delicate critic at 
many points ; but he wrote like a novelist — like 
Thackeray, say, of Fielding and Sterne — when he 
wrote of Armour as a ' facile and empty-headed 
girl,' and insisted, still possessed by Chambers's 
vain imaginings, that she was first and last in love 
with another man. In truth the facility was on 
the other side. In 1784 Burns is willing to marry 
Betty Paton, and writes thus to Thomas Orr : — ' I 
am very glad Peggy [Thomson] is off my hand, 
as I am at present embarrassed enough without her.' 
In 1785 he is courting Jean Armour, and very early 
in 1786 Jean is in the family way, and ' by hell ' she 
shall never be his wife. But some time in March 



l 'Peculiarly like nobody else' (R. B. to Arnot, April 1786). 
VOL. IV. 



290 ROBERT BURNS 

Jean is sent to Paisley ; and the ' maddening 
passions,' etc., set to work ; and he can no more ' se 
consoler de son depart ' than Calypso could for that 
of Ulysses. So in a hand's turn he hecomes the 
stricken deer, and, as we have seen, protests (to the 
Moon) that to marry Jean, and wear ' The promis'd 
father's tender name ' are his sole ambitions. As 
Jean does not return, however, he seeks (and finds) 
such comfort as he may in exchanging vows and 
Bibles and what Chamfort called ' fantaisies ' with 
Mary Campbell. On the 12th-13th May he writes 
The Court of Equity — a task the strangest con- 
ceivable for a lover, whether rejoicing or distraught. 
On the 14th ' Ayr, gurgling, kisses his pebbled 
shore,' and ' The flowers spring wanton to be 
prest,' and Highland Mary leaves for the West 
to make these famous preparations. On the 15th 
May he dates (at least) the Epistle to a Young 
Friend : — 

1 The sacred lowe o' weel-plac'd love, 
Luxuriantly indulge it,' etc.: — 

and, as for some time past, he is still the gallant, 
howbeit in jest, of Betty Miller : till on the 9th June 
' poor ill-advised Armour ' returns to Mauchline ; 
and on the 12th he writes that ' for all her part in a 
certain black affair ' he ' still loves her to distraction,' 
and, with a view to forgetting her has • run into all 
kinds of dissipation and riot . . . but in vain.' On 
the 28th June he appears before ' the Poacher 
Court,' acknowledges paternity, and is 'promised a 
certificate as a single man ' : on condition that he 
do penance before the congregation on three suc- 
cessive Sundays. On the 9th July, the occasion 



ROBERT BURNS 291 

of his first appearance, he has 'a foolish hankering 
fondness ' for Jean, but, calling on her and being 
put to the door, he remarks that she does not ' show 
that penitence that might have been expected ' ; so, 
on the 22nd, he executes a deed by which he 
makes over all his property to the 'wee image of 
his bonie Betty,' to the exclusion of whatever 
might come of his affair with the recusant. Then, 
en the 30th (Old Armour having, meanwhile, got a 
warrant against him, and sent him into hiding *), he 
adjures Richmond — (who, he knows, will ' pour an 
execration ' on Jean's head) — to ' spare the poor, 
ill-advised girl for my sake ' ; and on the 14th 
August he calls on Heaven to ' bless the Sex,' for 
that ' I feel there is still happiness for me among 
them.' Against this panorama of tumult and va- 
riety and adventure, enlarged in Edinburgh, and 
enriched at Ellisland and in Dumfries, there are to 
set the years of simple abnegation, magnanimity, 
and devotion with which the ' facile and empty- 
headed girl ' repaid the husband of her choice. 
The conclusion is obvious. The Novelist turned 
Critic is still the Novelist. Consciously or not, he 
develops preferences, for, consciously or not, he 
must still create. 2 Stevenson's preferences were 



1 No doubt he retired on information sent by Jean. 

2 Thus Stevenson, who himself liked 'dressing a part' (so to 
speak), was persuaded that Burns did likewise, and accepted oodily 
that absurd, fantastic story (told by two Englishmen), in which 
the Bard, in a fox-skin cap and an enormous coat, and girt with 
a Highland broadsword, is seen angling from a Nithside rock. 
Jean denied it, and said that Robert (who hated field-sports, as 
we know) never angled in his life. But the Novelist was roused; 
and all that was ignored. 



292 ROBERT BURNS 

with Rab Mossgiel. And the result was a grave — 
but not, I hope, a lasting — injustice to an excellent 
and very womanly woman and a mod^l wife. 1 

As to Highland Mary, one of two conclusions : 
(1) Either she was a paragon ; or (2) she was not. 
In the first case, her story has yet to be written, 
and written on evidence that is positive and irre- 
futable. In the second, the bronze at Dunoon 
bears abiding witness to the existence (at a certain 
time) of what can only be described as a national 
delusion. 



VI 

By this time the end of Mauchline, and of much 
besides, was nearer than Burns knew. Probably sent 
to press in the May of 1786, the Kilmarnock Volume 
was published at the end of July. 2 Most of, if not 



i On the 3rd September Jean lay in of twins. They were 
presently taken by their respective grandmothers, to •whom, I 
doubt not, they gave great joy : as in that and other stages of 
society the appearance of the third generation, whether its right to 
exist be legal or not, does always. Burns announced the event 
as only Burns could, by sending Nature's Law: — 

'Kind Nature's care had given him share 
Large of the flaming current,' etc.: — 

to Gavin Hamilton; a 'God bless the little dears,' with a snatch 
of indecent Bong, to Richmond; and a really heartfelt and affect- 
ing bit of prose on the subject of paternity to Robert Muir. 

2 One effect of its publication was to secure him the friendship 
of Mrs. Dunlop (ii. 352-3). It is evident from this lady's letters 
that her interest in him could scarce have been warmer had he 
been her son. She prized his correspondence as beyond rubies, 
and as a rule be was slower to reply than she (once, being hurt 
by his silence, she told him she wouldn't write again till he asked 



EOBERT BURNS 293 

all, the numbers contained in it were probably 
familiar to the countryside. Some had certainly 
been received with ' a roar of applause ' ; Burns, 
who was not the man to hide his light under a 
bushel (his temperament was too radiant and too 
vigorous for that), was given to multiplying his 
verses in MS. copies for friends ; he had been ' read 
into fame ' by Aiken the lawyer : so that Poems, 
Chiefly in the Scottish Dialect was, in a sense, as 
' well advertised ' as book could be. Its triumph 
was not less instant than well-deserved : l the first 
issue, six hundred copies strong, was exhausted 
in a month ('tis said that not one could be spared 
for Mossgiel). But Burns himself, according to 
himself, and he was ever punctiliously exact and 
scrupulous on the score of money, was but £20 in 



her, and, failing to draw him, within a week she is found begging 
his pardon for her petulance). She made him many gifts — 
apparently in money and in kind — gifts at New Year and other 
times, and accepted gifts from him (once he sent her a keg of old 
brandy). Her influence made ever for decency, and it may well 
have been on her remonstrances, which were strong, that he 
finally resolved to remove some of the coarser phrases in his 
earlier editions. Her last (extant) letter is dated 11th January 
1795. For some unexplained reasons she ceased from writing 
several months before the January of 1796. It may have been 
that she hoard of him as often in drink, or that she was told of the 
affair at Woodley Park. In any case she esteemed him so highly, 
and admired him so lavishly, that 't is quite impossible to believe 
the breach in the correspondence due to any fault of hers. 

1 'Old and young,' says Heron, high and low, grave and gay, 
learned or ignorant, all were alike delighted, agitated, transported. 
I was at that time resident in Galloway, contiguous to Ayrshire : 
and I can well remember, how that even the plough-boys and 
maid-servants would have gladly bestowed the wages which they 
earned the most hardly, and which they wanted to purchase 
necessary clothing, if they might but secure the works of Burns.' 



294 ROBERT BURNS 

pocket by it; the Kilmarnock printer declined to 
strike off a second impression, with additions, unless 
he got the price of the paper (£27) in advance ; and 
for some time it seemed that there was nothing but 
Jamaica for the writer, Local Bard and Local Hero 
though he were : so that he looked to have sailed in 
mid-August, and again on the 1st September, and 
at some indeterminate date had ' conveyed his chest 
thus far on the road to Greenock,' and written that 
solemn and moving song — far and away the best, I 
think, and the sincerest thing he left in English 
— The Gloomy Night is Gathering Fast. It was to 
be the ' last effort ' of his ' Muse in Caledonia.' But, 
for one or another reason, his departure was ever 
deferred ; and, though on the 30th October (some 
ten days, it is surmised, after the death of Mary 
Campbell), he was still writing that, ' ance to the 
Indies he was wonted,' he 'd certainly contrive to 
4 mak' the best o' life Wi' some sweet elf,' on the 
18th November, ' I am thinking for my Edinburgh 
expedition on Monday or Tuesday come s'ennight.' 
In effect, an ' Edinburgh expedition ' was natural 
and inevitable. Ballantine of Ayr is said to have 
suggested the idea of such an adventure ; Gilbert 
and the family are said to have applauded it. But 
as early as the 4th September the excellent Black- 
lock — (in ' a letter to a friend of mine which over- 
threw all my schemes ') — had called — ' for the sake 
of the young man ' — for a second edition, ' more 
numerous than the former ' : inasmuch as ' it appears 
certain that its intrinsic merit, and the exertions of 
the author's friends, might give it a more universal 
circulation than anything of the kind which has 



ROBERT BURNS 295 

been published within my memory.' Thus Black- 
lock ; and the ' friend of mine,' who was Lawrie, 
the minister of Loudoun, had communicated Black- 
lock's letter to the person most concerned in 
Blacklock's suggestion. Bold, proud, intelligent au 
possible, strongly possessed too (so he says, and so I 
believe) by the genius of paternity, Burns the Man, 
who had a very becoming opinion of Burns the 
Bard, and could fairly appreciate that worthy's 
merits, must certainly have seen that in Edinburgh 
he had many chances of succeeding at the very 
point where the Kilmarnock printer failed him. 
I do not doubt, either, that he was tired of being 
the Local Poet, the Local Satirist, the Local Wit, 
the Local Lothario (even), and eager to essay 
himself on another and a vaster stage than Mauch- 
line ; for, if he had n't been thus tired and thus 
eager, he would n't have been Robert Burns. The 
fighting spirit, the genius of emulation, is so strong 
in us all that a man of temperament and brains 
must assert himself, and get accepted at his own 
(or another) valuation, exactly as a cock must 
crow. And I love to believe that Burns, being 
immitigably of this metal, entered upon his adven- 
ture — (27th November : on a borrowed nag, with 
not much money, a letter of introduction to Dal- 
rymple of Orangefield, and a visiting list consisting 
entirely in Dugald Stewart and Richmond, the 
lawyer's clerk) — with the joyous heart and the stiff 
neck of one who knows himself a man among men, 
and whose chief ambition is to ' drink delight of 
battle with his peers ' — if he can find them. 

He reached the capital on the 28th November, 



296 ROBERT BURNS 

and was hospitably entertained by Richmond — to 
the extent, indeed, of a bedfellow's share in the 
clerk's one little room in Baxter's Place, Lawn- 
mai'ket. Through Dalrymple of Orangefield he got 
access to Lord Glencairn and others : among them 
Harry Erskine, Dean of Faculty, and that curious, 
irascible, pompous ass, the Earl of Buchan, and 
Creech the publisher, who had been Glencairn's 
tutor, and who advertised the Edinburgh Edition 
on the 14th December. He was everywhere re- 
ceived as he merited, and he made such admirable 
use of his vogue that, five days before Creech's 
advertisement was printed, he could tell his friend 
and patron, Gavin Hamilton, that he was rapidly 
qualifying for the position of Tenth Worthy and 
Eighth Wise Man of the World. He saw everybody 
worth seeing, and talked with everybody worth talk- 
ing to ; he was made welcome by ' heavenly Burnett ' 
and her frolic Grace of Gordon, and welcome by 
the ribald, scholarly, hard-drinking wits and jinkers 
of the Crochallan Fencibles, for whose use and 
edification he made the unique and precious collec- 
tion now called The Merry Muses of Caledonia ; he 
moved and bore himself as easily at Dugald Stewart's 
as in Baxter's Place, in Creech's shop, with Henry 
Mackenzie and Gregory and Blair, as at that extra- 
ordinary meeting of the St Andrew's Lodge, where, 
at the Grand Master's bidding, the Brethren assem- 
bled drank the health of ' Caledonia and Caledonia's 
Bard — Brother Burns ' : a toast received with ' multi- 
plied honours and repeated acclamations.' To look 
at, ' he was like a farmer dressed to dine with the 
laird ' ; his manners were ' rustic, not clownish ' ; he 



ROBERT BURNS 297 

had 'a sort of dignified plainness and simplicity.' 
Then, ' his address to females was always extremely 
deferential, and always ' — this on the authority of 
the Duchess of Gordon — ' with a turn to the pathetic 
or humorous, which engaged their attention particu- 
larly.' For the rest, ' I never saw a man in company 
with his superiors in station and information more 
perfectly free from either the reality or the affecta- 
tion of embarrassment.' Thus, long afterwards, Sir 
Walter, who noted also, boy as he was, ' the strong 
expression of sense and shrewdness in all his linea- 
ments,' and who, long afterwards, had never seen 
such an eye as Burns's ' in a human head, though 
I have seen the most distinguished men ' — 
(Byron among them ; and Byron's eye was one of 
Byron's points) — ' of my time.' It is not won- 
derful, perhaps, that Burns, with his abounding 
temperament, his puissant charm, his potency in 
talk, his rare gifts of eye and voice, 1 should have 
strongly affected Edinburgh Society, brilliant in its 
elements and distinguished in its effect as it was. 
There has been no Burns since Burns ; or history 
would pretty certainly have repeated itself. "What 
is really wonderful is the way in which Burns kept 
his head in Edinburgh Society, and stood prepared 
for the inevitable reaction. Through all the 'thick, 
strong, stupefying incense smoke ' (and there was 
certainly a very great deal of it), he held a steady 
eye upon his future. He saw most clearly that the 

1 Thus Maria Riddell: — 'His voice alone could improve upon 
the magic of his eye. Sonorous, replete with the finest modula- 
tions,' etc. It will be remembered that children used to speak 
of Byron as 'the gentleman with the beautiful voice.' 



298 ROBERT BURNS 

life of a nine-days' wonder is at most nine days, 
and that now was his time or never. But if he ex- 
pected preferment, he was neither extravagantly 
elated in anticipation, nor unduly depressed by dis- 
appointment ; and, for all his self-consciousness — 
(' And God had given his share ') — he was not too 
platonic to solicit the favours of at least one servant- 
girl (he was arrested, August 1787, on a warrant 
In meditatione fugce), nor too punctilious to make 
love to ' a Lothian farmer's daughter, a very pretty 
girl, whom I 've almost persuaded to accompany 
me to the West Country, should I ever return,' 
etc., nor too philosophical not to regret his Jean, 
and reflect (in this very letter to Gavin Hamilton) 
that he 'd never 4 meet so delicious an armful again.' 

In the long-run his magnanimity suffered a certain 
change. The peasant at work scarce ever goes 
wrong ; but abroad and idle, he is easily spoiled, 
and soon. Edinburgh was a triumph for Burns ; but 
it was also a misfortune. It was a centre of con- 
viviality — a city of clubs and talk and good-fellow- 
ship, a city of harlotry and high jinks, a city (above 
all) of drink : — 

' Whare couthy chiels at e'enin meet, 
Their bizzin craigs and mou's to weet: 
An' blythely gar auld Care gae by 
Wi' blinket and wi' bleering eye ': — 

a dangerous place for a peasant to be at large in, 
especially a peasant of the conditions and the stamp 
of Burns. He was young, he was buckishly given, 
and he was — Burns. He bad, as certain numbers 
in The Merry Muses witness, an entirely admirable 



ROBERT BURNS 299 

talent of a kind much favoured by our liberal 
ancestors. To hear him talk was ever a privilege ; 
while to hear him make such use as he might of 
this peculiar capacity cannot but have constituted 
an unique experience. After all, a gift 's a gift, and 
a man must use the gifts he has. No reasonable 
being can question that Burns used this one of 
his. 1 In those days he could scarce be buckish 
— or even popular — and do other. Even in the 
country, says Heron, in his loose yet lofty way, ' the 

1 This is noted neither in praise nor in dispraise. It is noted 
to show that Burns was essentially a man of his time: as how, 
peasant of genius that he was, could he be anything else? Our 
fathers loved sculduddery, and Burns, who came from Carrick 
— where, as Lockhart has remarked, the Vernacular was spoken 
with peculiar gaiety and vigour — was the best gifted of them 
all in this respect by virtue of his genius, his turn of mind, 
his peasanthood, and his wonderful capacity for talk. Josiah 
Walker notes of Burns that his conversation was ' not more 
licentious ' than the conversation heard at the tables of the 
great ; Lockhart regrets that he can give but few of Burns's mots, 
for the reason that the most of those preserved and handed down 
were unquotable. It was a trick of the time, and long after — (re- 
member Colonel Newcome's indignant retreat before old Costigan) 
— so that Lord Cork of The Bumper Toast, and Captain Morris at 
Carlton House, and Burns among the Crochallan Fencibles are 
but expressions of the same fashion in humour, the same tendency 
in the human mind to apprehend and rejoice in the farce of sex. 
I do not know that Burns and M 'Queen of Braxfield (Stevenson's 
Weir of Hermiston) ever met. But it was said of M 'Queen that 
he had never read anything but sculduddery and law; and to 
Ramsay of Ochtertyre, in whom Sir Walter found some elements 
of Monkbarns, the two men seemed cast in the same mould. 
Burns, in any case, was a man of the later Eighteenth Century 
(he sent one of his best-known facetice to Graham of Fintry, with 
a view to correcting some illiberal report about his politics); and to 
take him out of it, and essay to make him a smug, decent, Late- 
Victorian journalist is, as I think, to essay a task at once dis- 
creditable in aim and impossible of execution. 



300 ROBERT BURNS 

votaries of intemperate joys, with persons to whom 
he was recommended by licentious wit . . . had 
begun to fasten on him, and to seduce him to em- 
bellish the gross pleasures of their looser hours with 
the charms of his wit and fancy.' These temptations 
— (he was known, be it remembered, for the ribald of 
The Fornicator and The Court of Equity as well as for 
the poet of the Mountain Daisy and the Saturday 
Night) — he was by no means incapable of putting by. 
Mr. Arthur Bruce, indeed, 'a gentleman of great 
worth and discernment,' assured Heron that he had 
' seen the Poet steadily resist such solicitations and 
allurements to convivial enjoyment, as scarcely any 
other person could have withstood.' But — thus this 
author : intelligent, not unfriendly on the whole, on 
the whole competent — ' the bucks of Edinburgh ac- 
complished . . . that in which the boors of Ayrshire l 
had failed. After residing some months in Edinburgh 
he began to estrange himself, not altogether, but in 
some measure, from the society of his graver friends. 
. . . He suffered himself to be surrounded by a race of 
miserable beings who were proud to tell that they 
had been in company with Burns, and had seen 
Burns as loose and as foolish as themselves.' 2 One 
result of this condescension was this : always the 



i This appears to be a polite description, by a staunch (though 
drunken) Churchman, of those desperate spirits, Gavin Hamilton 
and Robert Aiken. 

2 I give all this fur what it is worth Hcnm himself was some- 
thing of a wastrel. Yet he li.i.l a clerical hahit and a clerical 
bias which made him easily censorious in the case of so hardened 
and so militant an anti-cleric as the Hard, lie was personally 
acquainted, however, with that hero; and his little biography 
(1797) is neither unintelligent nor ill-written. 



ROBERT BURNS 301 

best man in the room, ' the cock of the company,' 
as Heron puts it, ' he began to contract something 
of new arrogance in conversation ' ; till in the long- 
run 'he could scarcely refrain from indulging in 
similar freedom and dictatorial decision of talk, even 
in the presence of persons 1 who could less patiently 
endure his presumption.' Heron's detail is vague — 
not to say indefinite ; his effect may be misleading. 
But, as I said, the peasant at large — the peasant 
without hard work to keep him straight — must, 
almost of necessity, run to waste. And it is plain 
that, treading thus closely on the heels of ' the 
dissipation and riot,' the ' mason-meetings, drinking- 
matches, and other mischief,' of the year before, 
the distractions and the triumphs of Edinburgh 
continued the work which the mistakes and follies 
of Dumfries were to finish ten years after. 

At last, however, the First Edinburgh Edition 
appeared (21st April 1787). The issue ran to 
2800 copies, and 1500 of these were subscribed in 
advance. What Burns got for it is matter of doubt. 
Creech informed Heron that it was £1100 — which 
is a plain untruth ; Chambers says £500 ; Burns 
himself told Mrs. Dunlop (25th March 1789) that 
he expected to clear some £440 to £450. (Other 
impressions were called for in the course of the 
year, but the Bard had sold his copyright, and had 
no interest in them.) Whatever the amount, 2 Creech 

1 Heron himself, no doubt. He 'had the tongues,' and thought 
himself the better man. 

2 At the instancing of Henry Mackenzie, Creech paid I.urns 
(23rd April 1787) a hundred guineas for the copyright of the 
Poems, besides subscribing live hundred copies. The Caledonian 
Hunt subscribed another hundred ; and Burns sent seventy to 



302 ROBERT BURNS 

was a slow paymaster ; and, as Edinburgh was bad 
for Burns, and Creech was responsible for Burns's 
detention in Edinburgh, it is impossible not to regret 
that Burns had not another publisher. Burns in effect, 
his Second Edition once published, had nothing to 
do but pocket his receipts, 1 and be gone. This, 



Ballantine for 'a proper person' in Ayr, and wrote from Dunse 
(17th May) to acknowledge the receipt, from Pattison, the Paisley 
bookseller, of ' Twenty-two pounds, seven shillings sterling, 
payment in full, after carriage deducted for ninety copies ' more. 
Twenty-four copies went to the Earl and Countess of Glencairn, 
twenty to Prentice of Conington Mains, forty to Muir of Kilmar- 
nock, twenty-one to Her Grace of Gordon, forty-two to the Earl 
of Eglintoun, and a certain number to the Scots Benedictionaries 
at Maryborough and Ratisbon, and the Scots Colleges at Douay, 
Paris, and Valladolid. The subscription price was live, the price 
to non-subscribers six, shillings : the extra shilling being (Burns 
to Pattison, ut sup.) ' Creech's profit.' 

1 Heron ' had reason to believe that he had consumed a much 
larger proportion of these gains than prudence could approve ; 
while he superintended the impression, paid his court to his 
patrons, and wasted the full payment of the subscription money.' 
In effect, it is hard to see how, coming to Edinburgh with next to 
nothing in his pocket (the £20 from Wilson could not have gone 
very far), he could otherwise have lived. It would have been 
natural enough for him to have accepted gratuities, for the Age 
of Patronage was still afoot, and relief in this kind would have 
come as easily (to say the least) to the 'ploughing poet,' 
howbeit he was the proudest and in some respects the most 
punctilious of men, as to any other. I find it hard to believe 
that there were none. But there is no record of any ; and a 
letter (unpublished) of this period in acknowledgment of a gift 
of money from Mrs. Dunlop is almost painful in its embarrass- 
ment of gratitude and discomfort. On the whole, I take it that, 
however cheaply he lived in Edinburgh, he must of necessity have 
had to discount his profits, though not to anything like the extent 
suggested by Heron. Moreover, it is like enough that he spent a 
certain amount upon his Tours, and it is certain that Mossgiel was 
a dead loss to him. 



ROBERT BURNS 303 

however, was what Creech could not let him do : 
so that he went and came, and came and went, and 
it was not until the March of 1789 that the two 
men squared accounts. 1 

The Edition floated, comes a jaunt to the Border 
(begun 5th May) with Robert Ainslie. Then, by 
the 9th June, Burns is back at Mauchline, a much 
richer and a vastly more important person than he 
left it: able to lend his brother £180; reconciled, 
too, with Jean and her people, but disgusted, or 
feigning himself disgusted (for, after the repudia- 
tion, he is ever the superior and the injured 
party in regard to Jean), with the ' mean, servile 
compliance' with which his advances are met. 
Follows a tour to the West Highlands, which 
seems to be largely an occasion for drink and talk; 
and in July you find him back at Mauchline, 
boasting how he, 'an old hawk at the sport,' has 
brought ' a certain lady from her aerial towerings, 
pop, down at my foot, like Corporal Trim's hat' — 
which means that Jean is presently with child by 
him for the second time. In August he is at Edin- 
burgh, intent on a settlement with Creech, but on 
the 25th he starts for the Highland tour with his 
friend Nicol. 2 After a couple of excursions more — 

i Of the work he did about this time the best is to be found 
in the Haggis and the Epistles to Creech and the Guidwife of 
Wauchope House. What is very much more to the purpose is 
that he made Johnson's acquaintance, and at once began con- 
tributing to the Musical Museum. 

2 Heron describes Nicol as a man who ' in vigour of intellect 
and in wild yet generous impetuosity of passion, remarkably 
resembled . . . Burns' ; who 'by the most unwearied and extra- 
ordinary professional toil, in the midst of as persevering dissipa- 



304 ROBERT BURNS 

one to Ayrshire, to look at certain holdings — he is 
resolved on quitting Edinburgh, settlement or no 
settlement, to farm or go to the Indies, as circum- 
stances shall dictate. But it is written that his 
life shall have another disputable episode and the 
world an immortal scrap of song : — 

' Had we never lov'd sae kindly, 
Had we never lov'd sae blindly, 
Never met — or never parted — 
We had ne'er been broken-hearted.' 

So in the beginning of December he falls in with 
Mrs. M'Lehose ; he instantly proposes to ' cultivate 
her friendship with the enthusiasm of religion ' ; 
and the two are languishing in Arcady in the 
twinkling of a cupid's wing. 

She was a handsome, womanly creature — ' of a 
somewhat voluptuous style of beauty ' : a style the 
Bard appreciated — lively but devout, extremely sen- 
timental yet inexorably dutiful : a grass widow with 
children — nine times in ten a lasting safeguard — 



tion . . . won and accumulated an honourable and sufficient 
competence' ; and who died of 'a jaundice, with a complication 
of other complaints, the effects of long-continued intemperance.' 
Burns admired Nicol, named a son after him, and immortalised 
him as the 'Willie' who 'brew'd a peck o' maut.' lie had a 
generous heart and a brutal temper, with plenty of brains, a great 
contempt for custom and the Kirk, and what Lockhart calls 'a 
rapturous admiration of Burns'- genius.' The violent vulgarity 
of his behaviour at Castle Gordon Lb typical of the man. He 
bought a little property not far from Ellisland, and, what with 
pride and vanity and republican independence (so called) and an 
immitigable turn for liquor, was certainly as bad a neighbour as 
the Bard could possibly have had. 



ROBERT BURNS 305 

and the strictest notions of propriety — a good enough 
defence for a time ; but young (she was the Bard's 
own age), clever, 'of a poetical fabric of mind,' and 
all the rest. The upsetting of a hackney coach dis- 
abled Burns from calling on her for some weeks. 
But he wrote her letters, and she answered them ; and 
he was Sylvander, and she signed herself Clarinda; 
and they addressed each other in verse as well as 
prose ; and she said it could never be ; and he said 
that at least he must know her heart was his ; and 
Religion was her ' balm in every woe ' ; and he gave 
her his ideas of Deity ; and, when they could meet, 
Clarinda was ever afraid lest she had let Sylvander 
go too far ; and Sylvander, for liis part, was monstrous 
eloquent about 'Almighty Love' — (he was some- 
times dreadfully like his favourite Man of Feeling) 
— and was ' ready to hang himself ' about ' a young 
Edinburgh widow.' Widow she was not ; but her 
husband, who cared not a snap of the fingers for 
her, was away in the West Indies ; and it may 
perhaps have suited her lover — who never, so far 
as is known, was trained to the compromises and 
the obsequiencies of adultery — to soothe his con- 
science by making believe that the affair was at 
the most a simple everyday amour. Clarinda was 
of another make. In the prime of life, deserted, 
sentimental, a tangle of simple instincts and as 
simple pieties, she had the natural woman's desire 
for a lover and the religious woman's resolve to 
keep that lover's passion within bounds. It is 
scarce questioned that she succeeded : though there 
is a legend that a certain gallant and insinuating 
little lyric : — 
vol. rv. 



306 EOBERT BURNS 

' May, thy morn was ne'er sae sweet 
As the mirk night o' December ! 

For sparkling was the rosy wine, 
And private was the chamber, 

And dear was she I dare na name 
But I will ay remember ' — 

commemorates, not only their final meeting (De- 
cember 6th, 1791), but also, the triumph of the 
Bard. 1 In any event she was plainly an excellent 
creature, bent on keeping herself honest and her 
lover straight ; and it is impossible to read her 
letters to Sylvander without a respect, a certain 
admiration even, which have never been awakened 
yet by the study of Sylvander's letters to her. For 
Sylvander's point of view, as M'Lehose was still 
alive, and an open intrigue with a married woman 
would have been ruin, only one inference is pos- 
sible : that he longed for the shepherd's hour to 
strike for the chime's sake only ; so that, when 
he thought of his future, as he must have done 
anxiously and often, he cannot ever have thought 

1 Both At Fond Kiss and May, thy Morn were sent to 
Clarinda after the final parting; but the legend is ail-too obviously 
an effect of the very common human sentiment in deference 
to which so many novels end happily. For the rest, Sir Walter 
Scott wrote thus on the fly-leaf of a copy of the very scarce 
Belfast Edition (1806) of the Letters Addressed to Clarinda 
by Robert Burns, now at Abbotsford: — 'Clarinda was a Mrs. 
Meiklehose, wife of a person in the Wesl Indies, from whom she 
lived separate but without any blemish, I believe, on her reputa- 
tion. I don't wonder that the Bard changed her "thrice 
unhappy name " for the classical sound of Clarinda. She was a 
relative of my friend the late Lord Craig, at whose house I have 
seen her, old, charmless and devote. There was no scandal at- 
tached to her philandering with the Bard, though the Lady ran 
risques, for Burns was anything but platonic in his amours,' etc. 



ROBERT BURNS 307 

of it as Clarinda's, even though in a moment of 
peculiar exaltation he swore to keep single till that 
wretch, the wicked husband, died. 1 

Very early in 1788, Jean Armour — brought some 
time in the preceding summer ' pop, down at my 
feet, like Corporal Trim's hat' — was expelled her 
parents' house and took refuge at Tarbolton Mill. 
There Burns found her on his return, and thence 
he removed her to a house in ' Mauchline toun,' to 
the particular joy, a short while after, of Saunders 
Tait :— 

4 The wives they up their coats did kilt, 
And through the streets so clean did stilt, 
Some at the door fell wi' a pelt 

Maist broke their leg, 
To see the Hen, poor wanton jilt ! 
Lay her fourth egg.' 2 

Follows what is perhaps the most perplexing se- 
quence of circumstances in a perplexing life. To 
Clarinda, who knew of the affair with Armour, pitied 

1 M'Lehose outlived him many years. 

2 Some stanzas later in B — 7-ns's Hen Clockin in Mauchline, 
Saunders (who has been likening Jean to a ship) thus notes her 

state: — 

'Now she is sailing in the Downs, 
Calls at the ports of finest towns, 
To buy bed hangings and galloons ' : 
and comments with fury on the fact that she 's got, not only 'twa 
packs o' human leather,' but also 

' A fine cap and peacock feather, 

And wi't she 's douce, 
With a grand besom made of heather, 
To sweep her house.' 
It is worth noting that he winds up his lampoon by accusing the 
gossips at the lying-in of talking scandal of the rankest and 
reading The Holy Fair I 



308 ROBERT BURNS 

the victim — (this does not mean that she wished 
her married to Burns) — and had sped her shepherd 
on his homeward way with ' twa wee sarkies ' for the 
victim's little boy: a mistress, be it remembered, 
to whom he had written (14th February) in such 
terms as these : — ' I admire you, I love you as a 
woman beyond any one in the circle of creation ' : 
— he wrote, a few days after his arrival at Mauch- 
line, that he had 'this morning' (23rd February 
1788) ' called for a certain woman,' and been ' dis- 
gusted with her,' so that he could not 'endure her.' 
Though his heart 'smote him for the profanity,' 
he sought to compare the two ; and ' 'twas setting 
the expiring glimmer of a farthing taper beside the 
cloudless glory of the meridian sun.' ' Here,' the 
Old Hawk continues, ' here was tasteless insipidity, 
vulgarity of soul, and mercenary fawning. Tliere, 
polished good sense, Heaven-born genius, and the 
most generous, the most delicate, the most tender 
passion.' This to the contrary, it needs no great 
knowledge of life, and still less of Burns and Armour, 
to divine what happened ; and it needs as little 
of Burns at this point in his career to see why 
he ended his confession to Clarinda thus : — ' I 
have done with her, and she with me.' Eight 
days after this (3rd March 1788), in a letter to 
Ainslie, some parts of it too ' curious ' for a Victorian 
page, he tells a different story. 1 'Jean,' says he, 

1 The letter is best described as a Crochallanism — as something 
written by one Fencible for the edification of another Fencible, 
and dealing with its subject in right Fencible style and from the 
correct Fencible point of view. I am afraid that, like the afore- 
said Utter to Clarinda, it was designed as what Ainslie himself, 
then unregenerate, might have called 'a d d bite.' 



ROBERT BURNS 309 

'I found banished like a martyr — forlorn, desti- 
tute, and friendless ; all for the good old cause. 
I have reconciled her to her fate : I have reconciled 
her to her mother : * I have taken her a room : I 
have taken her to my arms : I have given her a 
mahogany bed : I have given her a guinea ; and 
I have ' — but here Scott Douglas's garbling begins, 
and Burns's inditing ends ; and the original must 
be read, or the reader will never wholly understand 
what manner of man the writer was. Then comes 
an avowal so disconcerting that I cannot choose but 
disbelieve it, and conclude that it was made for 
some special purpose. 'But,' says the Old Hawk, 
'but, as I always am, on every occasion — I have 
been prudent and cautious to an astounding degree ; 
I swore her, privately and solemnly, never to attempt 
any claim on me as a husband, even though anybody 
should persuade her she had such a claim, which 
she had not, 2 neither during my life nor after my 
death. She did all this like a good girl, and . . .' 
The rest is unquotable. At first consideration, the 
spectacle of the Bard keeping 'the wish'd, the 
trysted hour,' with a settled purpose of 'prudence 
and caution ' in his mind, and as it were the 
materials for swearing in his pocket, in nowise 
makes for enlightenment. On reflection, however, 
it becomes evident that Burns wrote thus to Ainslie, 
whom he had asked to call on Clarinda in his 
absence, simply that Ainslie might quote her his 
report of a second (and an entirely superfluous) act of 

1 Was reconciliation possible without a second offer of marriage? 
I doubt it. 

2 This is literally true: the 'unlucky paper ' was destroyed. 



310 ROBERT BURNS 

repudiation on Jean's part : 1 to the end, as I cannot 
doubt, of using the fact for all it was worth, when 
he himself appeared upon the scene. That this is 
at least a possible theory is shown by the terms in 
which he tells (7th March) the story of his recon- 
ciliation to Brown : 2 — ' I found Jean with her cargo 
very well laid in. ... I have turned her into a 
convenient harbour where she may lie snug till she 
unload, and have taken the command myself, not 
ostensibly, but for a time in secret.' This can only 
mean that he purposes to marry the girl. For all 
that, though, he still has hopes of a practical issue to 
his Edinburgh affair ; for in his next letter (writ the 
same day) to Clavinda, who has reproached him for 
silence, and at the same time owned that she counts 
' all things (Heaven excepted) but lost, that I may 
win and keep you,' ' Was it not blasphemy, then,' 
he asks, 'against your own charms and against my 
feelings, to suppose that a short fortnight could 
abate my passion ! ' With a vast deal more to the 
same purpose. Three days after, he starts again for 
Edinburgh, and plunges deeper in desire than ever 
for his 'dearest angel' (so he calls her on the 
17th March), the 'dearest partner of his soul' (four 
days after). 'Oh Clarinda' (same date), 'what 
do I owe to Heaven for blessing me with such 



1 There was no need of oaths from Jean : her lover had had 
his bachelor's certificate in his pocket for months. And such 
swearing as there was — was it not all on the other side ? 

2 It is important to note the difference in manner and tone and 
suggestion between Burns to Brown and Burns to Ainslie. Burns 
writes to Brown as friend to friend; to Ainslie as Fencible to 
Fencible — much, in fact, as Swiveller, President of the Glorious 
Apollos, to Chuckster, Vice of the same sublime Society. 



ROBERT BURNS 311 

a piece of exalted excellence as you ! ' He must 
leave for Ellisland vid Mauchline, on the 24th ; and 
'Will you open/ he asks, 'with satisfaction and de- 
light a letter' — ('twas all to be limited to letters 
soon) — 'from a man who loves, who has loved you, 
and who will love you to death, through death, and 
for ever ! ' They are to meet the next night, and 
he is to watch — (right Arcady, this!) — her lighted 
window : — ' 'Tis the star that guides me to Paradise.' 
And for him ' the great relish to all is — that Honor 
— that Innocence — that Religion, are the witnesses 
and guarantees of our happiness.' Follows a bit of 
the Bible adapted to their peculiar case ; and with 
an ' Adieu, Clarinda ! I am going to remember you 
in my prayers,' the Old Hawk stoops to his perch 
for the night. Nothing is known of the last engage- 
ment; but apparently the citadel remains inviolate, 
for the leaguer is raised next day, and the besieger 
draws off his forces by way of Glasgow. Thence he 
writes to Brown (26th March) that ' these eight days ' 
he has been ' positively crazed.' And by the 7th 
April he has made Jean Armour his wife. 

An amazing love-story ? True. But that love- 
story it was — that Burns was first and last enamoured 
of the woman he made his wife — is shown, I think, 
by the fact that to all intents and purposes he 
married her twice over. As for Clarinda, well . . . ! 
Clarinda complicates and exhilarates the interest to 
this extent at least : that if words mean anything, 
and the Bard be judged by those he wrote, the 
Bard, had Clarinda been indeed a widow, might 
at a given moment have found himself incapable 
of making Jean an honest woman. And had he 



312 ROBERT BURNS 

followed his fancy, not his heart ? How had the two 
Arcadians fared ? Tis for some future Chambers 
to divine and say. 

vn 

Meanwhile he had taken Ellisland, a farm in 
Dumfriesshire, of Miller of Dalswinton : with an 
allowance from his landlord, a worthy and generous 
man, of £300, for a new steading and outhouses. 
His marriage at last made formal and public (it seems 
to have been celebrated by Gavin Hamilton), on the 
5th August 1788 the bride and bridegroom appeared 
before the Session, acknowledged its irregularity, 
demanded its ' solemn confirmation,' were sentenced 
to be rebuked, were 'solemnly engaged to adhere 
faithfully to one another as husband and wife all 
the days of their life,' and were finally ' absolved 
from any scandal ' on the old account. But the new 
steading was long a-building. It was not till the 
6th November that Burns and Jean set up their 
rest in Dumfriesshire ; and even so, they had to go, 
not to their own farmhouse — (it was not ready for 
them till the August of 1789) — but, to a place called 
' The Isle,' about a mile away from it. Burns had 
taken Ellisland on the advice of a friendly expert ; 1 

i 'A lease was granted to the poetical farmer' (thus Heron, 
who knew the country) 'at the annual rent which his own friends 
declared that the due cultivation of his farm might easily enable 
him to pay.' But those friends, being Ayrshiremen, ' were little 
acquainted with the soil, with the manures, with the markets, 
with the dairies, with the modes of improvement in Dumfries- 
shire'; they had estimated his rental at Ayrshire rates; so that, 
'contrary to his landlord's intention,' he must pay more for 
Ellisland than Ellisland was worth. According to the elder 
Cunningham, Ellisland was a poet's choice, not a farmer's. 



ROBERT BURNS 313 

but he had had his doubts about the wisdom of ' guid 
auld Glen's ' decision, and these were soon justified. 
For a time, however, he stuck to his work like a 
man : conversing much, it would seem, in his leisure 
with his neighbour, Glenriddell, and others, whose 
honoured guest he was, making and vamping songs, 
paying some heed to national and local politics, 
and finding time for letters not a few — among 
them a long and elaborate criticism on some worth- 
less verses by that crazy creature, Helen Maria 
Williams. 1 But by the end of July 1789 he had 
resolved to turn his holding into a dairy farm to be 
run by Jean and his sisters, and to take up his 
gaugership 2 in earnest ; and on the 10th of August, 
some brief while after the completion of The Kirk's 
Alarm, he learned from Graham of Fintry (whom he 
had met, in 1787, at the Duke of Athole's, on his 
Second Highland Tour) that he was appointed 
Exciseman for that district of Dumfriesshire in 
which Ellisland is situate. The work was hard, 
for he had charge of ten parishes, and must 
ride two hundred miles a week to get his duty 



1 Burns was not onlj r a reader himself: he was ever the cause 
of reading in others. One of his occupations at Ellisland was the 
foundation and t lie management of a book-club. He took the 
keenest interest in the work, was especially careful in selection, 
and, according to Glenriddell, did whatever must be done himself. 
Like his father, he believed in education; and, like his father, he 
did his best to educate his kind by all the means which lay to 
his hand. He held that the peasant could not but be the better 
for good reading; and he exerted himself to the utmost to give the 
peasant what seemed to him the best that could be had. That he 
did so is as honourable a circumstance as is shown in his career. 

2 By Glencairn's interest he had been appointed to a place in 
the Excise as earlv as 1787. 



314 EOBERT BURNS 

done. But by the beginning of December, 'I have 
found,' he writes, ' the Excise business go a great 
deal smoother with me than I expected ' ; and that 
he ' sometimes met the Muses,' as he jogged through 
the Nithsdale hills, is shown by the fact that The 
Whistle, the excellent verses on Captain Grose 
(with whom he made acquaintance at Glenriddell's 
table) , and Thou Lingering Star, with Willie Brew'd, 
that best of drinking-songs, and The Five Carlins 
(a notable piece of mimicry, if no more), all be- 
long to the period of his probation, and were all 
written before the end of the year. Plainly, too, 
he was an officer at once humane and vigilant : since, 
while it is told of him that he could always wink 
when staring would mean blank ruin to some old 
unchartered alewife (say), his first year's 'decreet' 
— his share, that is, of the fines imposed upon his 
information — was worth some fifty or sixty pounds. 
Exercise and the open air are held good for a man's 
health; yet in the winter of 1789-90 this man 
suffered cruelly from his old ailment. As for verse, 
the Elegy on Matthew Henderson and Tarn o' Shanter 
(1790) seem a poor year's output for the poet of 
those wonderful months at Mossgiel. But work for 
Johnson was going steadily on ; so that the results 
of these barren-looking times are in a sort the best 
known of his titles to greatness and to fame. Thus 
he strove, and faltered, and achieved till 1791, by 
the beginning of which year he had realised that 
Ellisland was impossible ; that he could not afford 
his rent, which (so he told Mrs. Dunlop) was raised 
that year by £20, and must depend entirely on his 
Excisemanship : when he asked for service in a port, 



ROBERT BURNS 315 

and, by Mrs. Dunlop's interest, was transferred to 
1 a vacant side-walk ' in Dumfries town. Thither, 
his landlord setting no manner of impediment in his 
way, and his crops and gear having been well and 
profitably sold, 1 he removed himself in December, 
and established his family in a little house in the 
Wee Vennel. 

'Tis a circumstance to note that, beginning at 
Ellisland as the Burns of Of A' the Airts, some 
time before the end he was the Burns of Yestreen 
I Had a Pint o' Wine.*' That is, he married Jean 
in the April of 1788, and some two years after 
he got Anne Park with child. Jean bore him 
his second son (in wedlock) the 9th April 1791 ; 
and Anne Park had been delivered of a daughter 
by him ten days before (31st March). Some say 
that she died in childbed ; some that she lived to 
marry a soldier. Nobody knows, and, apparently, 
nobody cares, what became of her. She was no 
' white rose ' (with a legend). She was scarce a 



1 The standing crops were 'rouped ' in the last week of August. 
They realised 'a guinea an acre above the average.' But such 
a riot of drunkenness was 'hardly ever seen in this country.' 
See Burns to Sloan (Scott Douglas, v. 394) for details and for a 
confession: — ' You will easily guess how I enjoyed the scene; as 
I was no farther over than you used to see me ' : — which take 
you back to the Burns of The Jolly Beggars. The stock and 
gear 'were not sold till August' (Scott Douglas, v. 392). 'We 
did not come empty-handed to Dumfries,' Mrs. Burns told 
M'Diarmid. 'The Ellisland sale was a very good one. A 
cow in her first calf brought eighteen guineas, and the purchaser 
never rued his bargain. Two other cows brought good prices. 
They had been presented by Mrs. Dunlop of Dunlop.' 

2 I have read somewhere that the first quatrain — the flower 
of the song — is old; but I cannot verify the description. 



316 ROBERT BURNS 

' passion flower ' ; 1 and though the Bard himself 
thought the ditty he made upon her one of his hest, 
the ' Episode ' in which she played a principal part 
is not regarded with any special interest by his 
biographers. She was a tavern waitress, and he 
was the Bard ; and she pleased him ; and she lived, 
or died — it matters not which ; and there 's an end 
on 't. The true interest consists, perhaps, in the 
magnanimity of Jean, who, lying-in a few days 
after the interloper, was somehow moved to receive 
the interloper's child, and to suckle it with her 
own. It is further to note that Anne Park is the 
last of Burns's mistresses who has a name. That 
she was not the last in fact you gather from 
Currie ; 2 but this one is innominate. So far as is 



1 Chambers declares that, if .Iran had not been away in Ayr- 
shire, there would have been no Elizabeth Burns: which is surely 
the boldest apology for a husband's lapse, at the same time that 
it is the frankest admission of this particular husband's inability 
to cleave to his wife in absence, that has ever been offered to an 
admiring world. Scott Douglas knocks it on the head, and shows 
that Chambers's valour is greater than Chaniliers's sense of 
history, by proving that neither in the June nor the July of 1790 
could Jean have been away. 

2 He has been roundly and deservedly reproved for the manner 
and the circumstances in which he published his report — (of an 
'accidental complaint') — which, by the way, was started by 
Heron. For another piece of scandal, whether published or not 
I do not know — that at Dumfries the Bard talked openly with 
harlots — it is, of course, entirely unauthenticated; and I here 
refer to it but for the purpose of pointing out that, if it were 
true, the fact of such familiarities, however horrifying to respect- 
able Dumfries, would sit lightly enough both on Burns the 
peasant and on Burns the poet of The Jolly Beggars and My 
Auntie Jean Held to the Shore: that, if it were true, the 
memory of Burns exchanging terms with the light-heels of the 
port were simply one to set beside the memory of Burton re- 
joicing in the watermen at the bridge-foot at Oxford. 



ROBERT BURNS 317 

known, the goddesses of the years to come, the 
Cldorises and Marias and Jessies : — 

' 'T is sweeter for the despairing 

Than aught in the world beside ' : — 

are all platonic in practice, if not in idea. The 
recipe for song-making was soon to be this : — ' I put 
myself in the regimen of adoring a fine woman, 
and in proportion to the adorability of her charms, 
in proportion you ' — Thomson — ' are delighted 
with my verses.' It was a mistake, so far as the 
world is concerned. But Burns made it ; and by 
the time it was made, he probably knew no better. 
In his last years, indeed, the irresponsible Faunus 
of Mossgiel and Edinburgh becomes a kind of 
sentimental sultan, who changes, or rewards, his 
slaves of dream with a magnificence which, edi- 
fying or not, is at least amusing. Thus, you find 
him designing the publication of a book of songs, 
with portraits of the beauties by whom they are 
inspired ; Maria Riddell is expelled his lyrical 
harem as with a fork, because she has offended 
him ; Jean Lorimer, she of ' the lint-white locks,' 
— ( k Bonie lassie, artless lassie ! ') — is the Chloris 
of ditty after ditty, till of a sudden Chloris is a 
disgusting name, and ' what you once mentioned 
of " flaxen locks " is just ' — so just, indeed, that 
' they cannot enter into an elegant description 
of beauty.' 1 This he discovers in the February 

1 Is it not all the Peasant and his womankind ? The 
peasant's women are his equals. The sentiment of chivalry is not 
included in his heritage ; and he treats his associates in that lot 
of penury and toil which is his birthright as the 'predominant 
partner,' the breadwinner, the provider of children, may : he 



318 ROBERT BURNS 

of 1796, in the July of which year he dies. And 
he keeps up his trick of throwing the lyric hand- 
kerchief till the end. All through bis last illness 
he is tenderly solicitous about his wife, be it re- 
membered ; yet the deathbed songs for Jessie 
Lewars are the best of those closing years. 

In the result, then, Ellisland was a mistake : 
not so much because it was a farm, as because 
it was not Burns's own. 1 He was essentially and 
unalterably a peasant ; and as a peasant-poet, a 
crofter taking down the best verses ever dictated 
by the Vernacular Muse, he might, one would like 
to think, what with work in the fields, and work at 
his desk, and the strong, persuasive inducements 
of home, have attained to length of days and peace 
of mind and the achievement of still greater fame, 
at the same time that he realised the ideal which 
he has sublimated in some famous bines : — 

' To mak' a happy fireside clime 
For weans and wife, 
That 's the true pathos and sublime 
Of human life.' 

Plainly, though, it could not be. He had too much 
genius, too much temperament, for it to be : with 
too much interest in life, which to him, however 
diverse and however variable his moods, meant, 



punishes, that is, and he rewards. It is unlikely that this was 
Burns's practice with Jean ; but assuredly it was his practice 
with the 'fine women ' of his dreams. 

1 He would have liked the life well enough, he says, had he 
tilled his own acres. But to take care of another man's, at 
the cost, too, of a horrible and ever-recurring charge called rent — 
that was the devil I 



ROBERT BURNS 319 

largely, if not wholly, Wine and Woman and Song. 
Also, he had been too hardly used, too desperately 
driven in his youth, and too splendidly petted and 
pampered in his manhood, to endure with constancy 
the work by which the tenant-farmer has to earn 
his bread. He had seen his father fail at Mount 
Oliphant and Lochlie ; and he had shared his 
brother's failure at Mossgiel. By no fault of his 
own, but owing to the circumstance that he had 
taken a holding out of which he could not make 
his rent, he failed himself at Ellisland ; and though, 
in his case, there was small risk of ' a factor's snash,' 
he was infinitely too honest and too proud to take un- 
due advantage of another man's bounty : so, to make 
ends meet, he turned gauger, and took charge of 
ten parishes, and rode two hundred miles a week in 
all weathers. It was a thing he'd always wanted 
to do, and, at the time he took to doing it, it was 
the only thing that could profitably be done by 
him. But his misfortune in having to do it was 
none the less for that. It took him from his home, 
it unsettled his better habits, it tbrew him back 
on Edinburgh and his triumphing experience as 
an idler and a Bard, it led him into temptation 
by divers ways. And when Pan, his goat-foot 
father — Pan, whom he featured so closely, in his 
great gift of merriment, his joy in life, his puissant 
appetites, his innate and never-failing humanity 
— would whistle on him from the thicket, he 
could not often stop his ears to the call. He was 
the most brilliant and the most popular figure in 
the district ; he loved good-fellowship ; he needed 
applause ; he rejoiced in the proof of his own 



320 ROBERT BURNS 

pre-eminence in talk — rejoiced, too, in the tran- 
scendentalising effect of liquor upon the talker, 1 as 
in the positive result of his name and fame, his 
prestance and his personality, upon adoring women. 
Is it not plain that Dumfries was inevitable ? Or, 
rather, is it not plain that, first and last, the life 
was one logical, irrefragable sequence of prepara- 
tions for the death ? That Mount Oliphant and 
Lochlie led irresistibly to Mauchline, as Mauchline 
to Edinburgh, and Edinburgh to Ellisland, and 
Ellisland to the house in the Mill Vennel ? And 
is not the lesson of it all that there is none so un- 
fortunate as the misplaced Titan — the man too great 
for his circumstances ? Speaking broadly, I can 
call none to mind who, in strength and genius and 
temperament, presents so close a general likeness 
to Burns as Mirabeau. Born a noble, and given an 
opportunity commensurate with himself, Burns would 
certainly have done such work as Mirabeau's, and 
done it at least as well. Born a Scots peasant, 
Mirabeau must, as certainly, have lived the life and 
died the death of Burns. In truth, it is only the 
fortune of war that we remember the one by his 
conduct of the Revolution, which called his highest 
capacities into action, while we turn to the other for 
his verses, which are the outcome (so Maria Riddell 
thought, and was not alone in thinking) of by no 
means his strongest gift. 

i He complained (to Clarinda) long ere this of the 'savage 
hospitality ' he could not choose hut accept. And, in effect, he 
had the ill-luck to start drinking at a time when whisky, fire- 
new from the Highlands, was the fashionable tipple, and was fast 
superseding ale. Born a generation earlier, when ale and claret 
were the staple comforters, he had stood a better chance. 



ROBERT BURNS 321 



vm 
Whatever the sequel, it may fairly be said for 
Ellisland that Burns and Jean were happy there, 
and that it saw the birth of Tarn o' Shanter and the 
perfecting, in the contributions to Johnson's Museum, 
of the Vernacular Song. 1 The last, as we know, was 
Burns's work ; but he had assistants, and they did 
him yeoman service. He worked in song exactly 
as he worked in satire and the rest — on familiar, 
old-established bases ; but he did so to a very much 
greater extent than in satire and the rest, and with 
a great deal more of help and inspiration from with- 
out. I have said that he contributed nothing to 
Vernacular Poetry except himself, but, his contribu- 
tion apart, was purely Scots-Traditional ; and this is 
especially true of his treatment of the Vernacular 
Song. What he found ready to his hand was, 
in brief, his country's lyric life. Scotland had 
had singers before him ; and they, nameless now 
and forgotten save as factors in the sum of his 
achievement, had sung of life and the experiences 
of life, the tragedy of death and defeat, the farce 
and the romance of sex, the rapture and the fun of 



1 I say nothing of the numbers sent to Thomson. Very many 
are copied from the Museum, and the others need not here be 
discussed with even an approach to particularity. A point to note 
in connexion with the contributions both to the Museum and to 
Scottish Airs is that Burns was honourably and intensely proud 
of them. He regarded them as work done in the service of the 
Scotland whose 'own inspired Bard' he was, and neither asked 
money, nor would take it, for them. To think that he was writ- 
ing for Thomson to the very end is to have at least one pleasant 
memory of Dumfries. 
VOL. rv. 



322 ROBERT BURNS 

battle and drink, with sincerity always, and often, 
very often, with rich or rich-rank humour. Among 
them they had observed and realised a little world 
of circumstance and character ; among them they 
had developed the folk-song, had fixed its type, had 
cast it into the rhythms which best fitted its aspira- 
tions, had equipped it with all manner of situations 
and refrains, and, above all, had possessed it of 
a great number of true and taking lyrical ideas. 
Any one who has tried to write a song will agree 
with me, when I say that a lyrical idea — by which 
I mean a rhythm, a burden, and a drift — once 
found, the song writes itself. It writes itself 
easily or with difficulty, it writes itself well or ill ; 
but in the end it writes itself. In this matter of 
lyrical ideas Burns was fortunate beyond any of 
Apollo's sons. He had no need to quest for them : 
there they lay ready to his hand, and he had but to 
work his will with them. That they were there 
explains the wonderful variety of his humours, his 
effects, and his themes : that he could live and work 
up to so many among them is proof positive and 
enduring of the apprehensiveness of his humanity, 
his gift of right, far-ranging sympathy. It is certain 
that, had he not been, they had long since passed 
out of practical life into the Chelsea Hospital of 
some antiquarian publication. But it is also certain 
that, had they not been there for him to take and 
despoil and use, he would not have been — he 
could not have been — the master-lyrist we know. 
What he found was of quite extraordinary worth 
to him ; what he added was himself, and his 
addition made the life of his find perennial. But, 



ROBERT BURNS 323 

much as are the touch of genius and the stamp 
of art, they are not everything. The best of many 
nameless singers lives in Burns's songs ; but that 
Burns lives so intense a lyric life is largely due 
to the fact that he took to himself, and made his 
own, the lyrical experience, the lyrical longing, the 
lyrical invention, the lyrical possibilities of many 
nameless singers. He was the last and the greatest 
of them all; but he could not have been the great- 
est by so very much as he seems, had these innomi- 
nates not been, nor could his songs have been so 
far-wandered as they are, nor so long-lived as they 
must be, had these innominates not lived their lyric 
life before him. In other terms, the atmosphere, 
the style, the tone, the realistic method and design, 1 
with much of the material and the humanity, of 
Burns's songs are inherited. Again and again his 
forefathers find him in lyrical ideas, in whose absence 
there must certainly — there cannot but have been — 



1 As I have said (see ante, pp. 278-9, Note 1), realism is the dis- 
tinguishing note of the Vernacular School; and the folk-singers 
are not less curious in detail than their literary associates and 
forebears. Even that long sob of pain, 0, Waly, Waly, has its 
elements of everyday life circumstance: — 

' My love was clad in the black velvet, 
And I myself in cramasie ' : — 
its references to St. Anton's Well and Arthur's Seat and the 
sheets that 'sail ne'er be pressed by me.' Cf., too, that wonder- 
ful little achievement in romance, The Twa Corbies: — 
'Ye '11 sit on his white hause-bane, 

And I '11 pyke out his bonie blue e'en, 
Wi' ae lock o' his gowden hair 
We '11 theek our nest when it grows bare.' 
Cf., too, in other styles, Toddlin Hame and Ellibanks and Elli- 
braes and — well, any folk-song you care to try I 



324 ROBERT BURNS 

a blank in his work. They are his best models, and 
he does not always surpass them, as he is sometimes 
not even their equal. 1 And if his effect along 
certain lines and in certain specified directions be 
so intense and enduring as it is, the reason is that 
they are a hundred strong behind him, and that he 
has selected from each and all of them that which 
was lyrical and incorruptible. A peasant like them- 
selves, he knew them as none else could ever know. 
He sympathised from within with their ambitions, 
their fancies, their ideals, their derisions, even as he 
was master, and something more, of their methods. 
And, while it is fair to say that what is best in 
them is sublimated and glorified by him, it is also 
fair to say that, but for them, he could never have 
approved himself the most exquisite artist in folk- 
song the world has ever seen. 

It has been complained that, thus much of his 
claim to be original removed, he must henceforth 
shine in the lyrical heaven with a certain loss of 
magnitude and his splendour something dimmed. 
And this is so far true tbat the Burns of fact differs, 
and differs considerably and at many points, from 

i Cf. 0, Waly, Waly and The Twa Corbies and Helen of 
Kirkconnel; with Toddlin Hame, which Burns thought 'the first 
bottle-song in the world, ' the old sets of A Cock-Laird Fit' Cadgie 
and Fee Jlim, Father, and, in yet another genre, 0, Were My Love. 
Even in The Merry Muses Burns, who wrote a particular class of 
song with admirable gust and spirit, does no better work than 
some of the innominates — the poets of Erroch Brae and Johnie 
Scott and Jenny M'Craw, for example; while his redaction of 
Ellibahks and Ellibraes — ('an old free-spoken song which cele- 
brates this locality would be enough in itself to bring the poet 
twenty miles out of his way to see it ') — is in nowise superior to 
the original. 



ROBERT BURNS 325 

the Burns of legend. The one is an effect of cer- 
tain long-lived, inexorable causes ; the other— *-that 
' formidable rival of the Almighty,' who, deriving 
from nobody, and appearing from nowhere, does in 
ten years the work of half-a-dozen centuries — is an 
impossible superstition, as it were a Scottish Mumbo- 
Jumbo. The one comes, naturally and inevitably, 
at the time appointed, to an appointed end ; but 
by no conceivable operation in the accomplishing of 
human destiny could the other have so much as begun 
to be. And, after all, however poignant the regret, 
and however wide-eyed and resentful the amaze- 
ment of those who esteem a man's work on the 
same terms as they would a spider's, and value it 
in proportion as it does, or does not, come out of 
his own belly, enough remains to Burns to keep 
him easily first in the first flight of singers in the 
Vernacular, and to secure him, outside the Ver- 
nacular, the fame of an unique artist. I have said 
that, as I believe, his genius was at once imi- 
tative and emulous ; and, so far as the Vernacular 
Song is concerned, to turn the pages of our Third 
Volume is to see that, speaking broadly, his function 
was not origination but treatment, and that in 
treatment it is that the finer qualities of his en- 
dowment are best expressed and displayed. His 
measures are high-handed enough ; but they are 
mostly justified. 1 He never boggles at appropriation, 2 

i Not always. See Vol. iii. (p. 96 and Note) for an attempt to 
improve upon Ayton (or another), and ante (p. 42 and Note) for 
another to Improve upon Carew. Both are failures; but only 
one is in the Vernacular, and neither owns a Vernacular original. 

2 Besides the folk-singers and the nameless lyrists of the 
song-books, he is found pilfering from Sedley, Garrick, Lloj'd, 



J. 



326 ROBERT BURNS 

so that some of his songs are the oddest con- 
ceivable mixture of Burns, Burns's original, and 
somebody Burns has pillaged. TaV.e, for instance, 
that arch and fresh and charming thing, For the Sake 
of Somebody. In the first place, ' Somebody ' comes 
to Burns as a Jacobite catchword ; and in the next, 
the lyrical idea is found in a poor enough botch by 
Allan Ramsay : — 

' For the sake of Somebody, 

For the sake of Somebody, 
I could wake a winter's night 

For the sake of Somebody.' 

This is pretty certainly older than The Tea-Table 
Miscellany, and has nothing whatever to do with the 
verses which the elder minstrel has tagged it withal. 
But it is a right lyrical idea, and in the long-run a 
lyrical idea is a song. So thinks Burns ; and you 
have but to compare the two sets to see the differ- 
ence between master and journeyman at a glance. 
The old, squalid, huckstering little comedy of court- 
ship: — 

' First we '11 buckle, then we '11 tell, 

Let her flyte and syne come to . . . 
I '11 slip hanie and wash my feet, 

An' steal on linens fair and clean, 
Syne at the trysting place we '11 meet, 

To do but what my dame has done': — 



Ramsay, Fergusson, Theobald, Carew, Mayne, Dodsley, and Sir 
Robert Ayton (or another). See also our Notes (Vol. iii.) on Duncan 
Davison, on Landlady, Count the Lawin, on Sweetest May, on The 
Winter it is Past, on We 're A' Noddin, to name but these ; and, 
as a further illustration of his method, note that, according to Scott 
Douglas (ms. annotation), the first three lines of Gat Ye Me belong 
to old song No. i., the next five to Burns, and the last eight to 
old song No. ii. 



ROBERT BURNS 327 

gives place to a thing to-day as comfortable to the 
ear and as telling to the heart as when Burns vamped 
it from Ramsay's vamp from somebody unknown. 
What is further to note is that not all the latest 
vamp is Burns plus Ramsay plus Innominate I. plus 
Jacobite catchword: inasmuch as the first line of 
Stanza n. is conveyed from an owlish lover in The 
Tea-Table Miscellany : — 

• Ye powers that preside over virtuous love.' 

Thus some solemn poetaster a good half-century at 
least ere Burns; and for over a hundred years 
'Ye Powers that smile on virtuous love' has lived 
as pure Burns, and as pure Burns is now passed 
into the language. Yet, despite the pilferings and 
the hints, it were as idle to pretend that Somebody, 
as it stands, is not Burns, as it were foolish to assert 
that Burns would have written Somebody without a 
certain unknown ancestor. Another flash of illustration 
comes from It Was A' For Our Rightful King : with 
its third stanza lifted clean from Matty Stewart, and 
set in a jewel of Burnsian gold, especially contrived 
and chased to set it off and make the lyric best of 
it. A third example is found in A Red, Red Rose, 
which, as we have shown (iii. 143 and Note), is a 
mosaic of rather beggarly scraps of English verse: 
just as Jonson's peerless Drink To Me Only With 
Thine Eyes is a mosaic contrived in scraps of 
conceited Greek prose. It is exquisitely done, of 
course; but, the beggarly scraps of verse away, 
could it ever have been done at all? And Auld 
Lang Syne ? It passes for pure Burns ; but was the 
phrase itself — the phrase which by his time had 



328 ROBERT BURNS 

rooted itself in the very vitals of the Vernacular — 
was the phrase itself, I say, not priceless to him ? 
Something or nothing may be due to Ramsay for 
his telling demonstration of the way in which it 
should not be used as a refrain. But what of that 
older maker and the line which Burns himself 
thought worth repeating, and which the world re- 
joices, and will long rejoice, to repeat with Burns : — 

1 Should auld acquaintance be forgot, 
An' never thocht upon ? ' 

Is there nothing of his cadence, no taste of his 
sentiment, no smack of his lyrical idea, no memory 
(to say the least) of his burden : — 

' On old long syne, my jo, 
On old long syne, 
That thou canst never once reflect 
On old long syne ' : — 

in the later masterpiece ? To say ' No ' were surely 
to betray criticism. And Ay Waukin, — should 
we, could we ever, have had it, had there been 
nobody but Burns to start the tune and invent the 

lyrical idea ? 

' O, wat, wat, 

O, wat and weary ! 
Sleep I can get nane 

For thinkin o' my dearie. 

' A' the night I wake, 
A' the day I weary, 
Sleep I can get nane 

For thinkin o' my dearie.' 

Thus, it may be, some broken man, in hiding among 
the wet hags ; some moss-trooper, drenched and 



ROBERT BURNS 329 

prowling, with a shirtf ul of sore bones ! Whoever 
he was, and whatever his calling and condition, he 
had at least one lyrical impulse, he has his part in a 
masterpiece by Burns, and his part is no small one. 
I might multiply examples, and pile Pelion upon 
Ossa of proof. But to do so were simply to repeat 
the Bibliographical and the Notes to our Third 
Volume ; and in this place I shall be better employed 
in pointing out that these double conceptions (so to 
speak), these achievements in lyrical collaboration, 
are for the most part the best known and the best 
liked of Burns's songs, and are, moreover, those 
among Burns's songs which show Burns the song- 
smith at his finest. The truth is that he wrote two 
lyric styles : (1) the style of the Eighteenth Cen- 
tury Song-Books, 1 which is a bad one, and in which 



1 He was trained in it from the first. In early youth he carried 
an English song-book about with him — wore it in his breeches- 
pocket, so to speak. This was The Lark : ' Containing a Collec- 
tion of above Four Hundred and Seventy Celebrated English and 
Scotch Songs, None of which are contain'd in the other Collec- 
tions of the same size, call'd The Syren and The Nightingale. 
With a Curious and Copious Alphabetical Glossary for Explain- 
ing the Scotch words. London. Printed (1746) for John Osborn 
at the Golden Ball in Pater Noster Row.' 'Tis a fat little book, 
and as multifarious a collection of Restoration and — especially — 
post-Restoration songs as one could wish to have : antiquated 
political squibs ; ballads, as Chevy Chace, with Gilderoy, the 
Queen's Old Soldier, and Katherine Hayes ; a number of in- 
decencies from D'Urfey's Pills ; Scots folk-songs, like Toddlin 
Hame and The Ewe Bughts, and 0, Waly, Waly and John 
Ochiltree and The Blithesome Bridal ; current English ditties like 
Old Sir Simon and Phillida Flouts Me ; a song of a Begging 
Soldier, whose vaunt, ' With my rags upon my bum,' is echoed in 
The Jolly Beggars ; much Allan Ramsay ; with scattered examples 
of Dryden, Dorset, Congreve, Alexander Scott, Brome, Prior, 
Wycherley, Rochester, Farquhar, Cibber — even Skelton ; and a 



330 ROBERT BURNS 

he could be as vulgar, or as frigid, or as tame, as very 
much smaller men ; 1 and (2) the style of the Verna- 
cular Folk-Song, which he handled with that under- 
standing and that mastery of means and ends which 
stamp the artist. To consider his experiments in 
the first is to scrape acquaintance with Clarinda, 
Mistress of My Soul, and Turn Again, Thou Fair 
Eliza, and On A Bank of Flowers, and Sensibility 
How Charming, and Castle Gordon, and A Big-Bellied 
Bottle, and Strathallan's Lament, and Raving Winds 
Around Her Blowing, and How Pleasant the Banks, 
and A Rose-bud, By My Early Walk," 1 and many a 
thing besides, which, were it not known for the work 

wilderness of commonplace ditties about love and drink : on 
the whole, an interesting collection — particularly if you take it 
as an element in the education of the lyric Burns. 

1 Cf. Their Groves of Sweet Myrtle (Vol. ill. 252 and Note), 
among other things : — 

'The slave's spicy forests and gold-bubbling fountains 

The brave Caledonian views wi' disdain: 
He wanders as free as the winds of his mountains, 
Save Love's willing fetters — the chains o' his Jean.' 
Such achievements in what Mr. Meredith calls 'the Bathetic,' are 
less infrequent in Burns than could be wished. 

2 It is understood that Scots Who, Hae is an essay in the 
Vernacular (I gather, by the waj r , that it is one of the two of 
three pieces by ' the Immortal Exciseman nurtured ayont the 
Tweed ' which are most popular in England). But, even so, 
one has but to contrast it with Is There for Honest Poverty, 
to recognise that in the one the writer's technical and lyrical 
mastery is complete, while in the other it is merely academic — 
academic as the lyrical and technical mastery of (say) Rule 
Britannia. Now, Is There for Honest Poverty is caique on 
a certain disreputable folk-song ; while Scots Wha Hae is 
for all practical purposes the work of an Eighteenth Century 
Scotsman writing in English, and now and then propitiating the 
fiery and watchful Genius of Caledonia by spelling a word as it 
is spelt in the Vernacular. 



ROBERT BURNS 331 

of a great poet, would long since have gone down 
into the limbo that gapes for would-be art. In the 
other are all the little masterpieces by which Burns 
the lyrist is remembered. He had a lead in The 
Silver Tassie l and in Auld Lang Syne, in A Man 's a 
Ma,n and Duncan Davison, in A Waukrife Minnie 
and Duncan Gray and Finlay, in 2" Hae a Wife and 
It Was A' For Our Rightfu' King and A Red, Red 
Rose, in Macphersorts Lament, and Ay Waukin, 0, 
and Somebody, and Whistle an' I'll Come to Ye — 
in all, or very nearly all, the numbers which make 
his lyrical bequest as it were a little park apart — 
an unique retreat of rocks and sylvan corners and 
heathy spaces, with an abundance of wildings, and 
here and there a hawthorn brake where, to a sound 
of running water, the Eternal Shepherd tells his 
tale — in the spacious and smiling demesne of 
English literature. And my contention — that it is 
to Burns the artist in folk-song that we must turn 
for thorough contentment — is proved to the hilt 
by those lyrics in the Vernacular for which, so far 
as we know, he found no hint elsewhere, and in 
which, so far as we know, he expressed himself 
and none besides. He had no suggestions, it seems 
(but I should not like to swear), no catchwords, no 
lyrical material for Tarn Glen and Of A' the Airts, 
for Willie Brewed and Bonie Doon, for Last May a 
Braw Wooer and 0, Wert Thou in the Cauld Blast,' 2 



1 ' The first four lines are old,' he says, 'the rest is mine.' And, 
in effect, the quatrain is unique in his work. 

2 It is oddly and amusingly illustrative of Burns' s trick of 
mosaic that a line in this charming song : 

' The brightest jewel in my crown ' : — 
comes bodily from — The Court of Equity ! 



332 ROBERT BURNS 

and Mary Morison — to name no more. But, if they 
be directly referable to nobody but himself, they 
feature his whole ancestry. They are folk-songs 
writ by a peasant of genius, who was a rare and 
special artist ; and they show that the closer he 
cleaved to folk-models, and the fuller and stronger 
his possession by the folk-influence, the more of the 
immortal Burns is there to-day. 

Suggested or not, the songs of Burns were devised 
and written by a peasant, devising and writing for 
peasants. The emotions they deal withal are the 
simplest, the most elemental, in the human list, and 
are figured in a style so vivid and direct as to be 
classic in its kind. Romance there is none in them, 
for there was none in Burns 1 — 'tis the sole point, 
perhaps, at which he was out of touch with the 
unrenowned generations whose flower and crown he 
was. But of reality, which could best and soonest 



1 None, or so little that if his Jacobitisms seem romantic, it is 
only by contrast with the realities in which they occur. The 
interest of even It Was A' For Our RightJ'u' King is centred in 
the vamper's sympathy, not with the romantic situation : — 

' He turn'd him right and round about 
Upon the Irish shore,' etc. : — 

but with that living, breathing, palpitating 'actuality' of senti- 
ment developed in both hero and heroine by the disastrous turn 
of circumstances : — 

' Now a' is done that men can do, 
And a' is done in vain ' : — 

and the position created by those circumstances at the end : — 
' But I hae parted f rae my love 
Never to meet again ' : — 
which places this lyric somewhere near the very top of homely 
and familiar song. 



ROBERT BURNS 333 

bring them home to the class in which their genius 
was developed, and to which themselves were 
addressed : — 

' Grain de muse qui git invisible 
Au fond de leur e'ternite' ' : — 

there is enough to keep them sweet while the Ver- 
nacular is read. They are for all, or nearly all, the 
peasant's trades and crafts : so that the gangrel 
tinker shares them with the spinner at her wheel, 
the soldier with the ploughman, the weaver with 
the gardener and the tailor and the herd. Morals, 
experiences, needs, love and liquor, the rejoicing 
vigour and unrest of youth, the placid content 
of age — there is scarce anything he can endure 
which is not brilliantly, and (above all) sincerely 
and veraciously, set forth in them. That old-world 
Scotland, whose last and greatest expression was 
Burns, either has passed or is fast passing away. 
In language, manners, morals, ideals, religion, sub- 
stance, capacity, the theory and practice of life — in 
all these the country of Burns has changed : in some, 
has changed ' beyond report, thought, or belief.' But 
that much of her which was known to her poet is 
with us still, and is with us in these songs. For 
man and woman change not, but endure for ever : 
so that what was truly said a thousand years ago 
comes home as truth to-day, and will go home as 
truth when to-day is a thousand years behind. To 
the making of these things there went the great 
and generous humanity of Burns, with the humanity, 
less great but still generous and sincere, of those 
unknowns, whose namelessness was ever a regret to 



334 ROBERT BURNS 

him. 1 They are art in their kind. And there is 
no reason why this ' little Valclusa fountain ' should 
lack pilgrims, or run dry, for centuries. 2 



rx 

I purpose to deal with the Dumfries period with 
all possible brevity. The story is a story of de- 
cadence ; and, even if it were told in detail, 
would tell us nothing of Burns that we have not 
already heard or are not ail-too well prepared to 
learn. In a little town, where everybody 's known 



1 ' Are you not quite vexed to think that these men of genius, 
for such they certainly were, who composed our fine Scottish 
tyrics, should be unknown ? It has given me many a heartache ' 
(R. B. to Thomson, 19th November 1794). And see his Journal 
for a more heart-felt recognition still. 

2 They lived not long the limited life of Johnson's Musical 
Museum, and Thomson's Scottish Airs. Thus, in a collection of 
North of England chap-books (c. 1810-20) which I owe to the kind- 
ness of the Earl of Crawford, I find at least two Burns ' Songsters ' 
— (they are the same, but one is called ' The Ayrshire Bard's Song- 
ster,' the other something else) — both ' Printed by J. Marshall in 
the Old Fleshmarket, ' Newcastle. In a third — a miscellany, this 
one — is Scots Wha Hae, * As sung by Mr. Braham at the Newcastle 
Theatre Royal ' (Carlyle thought this famous lyric should be ' sung 
by the throat of the whirlwind ' ; but it had better luck than that). 
The great Jew tenor further warbled a couple of stanzas of The 
Winter It is Past at a concert in the same city, when Miss Stephens 
was responsible for Charlie He 's My Darling. In other chaps 
Burns is found rubbing shoulders with Moore and Campbell and 
Tom Dibdin, and a hundred others, among them Allan Ramsay. 
In these Of A' the Airts is sandwiched between The Twopenny 
Postman and the Wedding at Ballyporeen, while Somebody is 
kept in countenance by Paddy Carey and The Wounded Hussar. 
The most popular, perhaps, are Of A' the Airts, and Scots Wha 
Hae, and Willie Brew'd; but On a Hank of Flowers lacks not 
admirers. 



ROBERT BURNS 335 

to everybody, there is ever an infinite deal of 
scandal; and Burns was too reckless and too con- 
spicuous not to become a peculiar cock-shy for the 
scandalmongers of Dumfries. In a little town, 
especially if it be a kind of provincial centre, there 
must of necessity be many people with not much to 
do besides talking and drinking; and Burns was 
ever too careless of consequences, as well as ever too 
resolute to make the most of the fleeting hour — it 
may be, too, was by this time too princely and too 
habitual a boon-companion — to refrain from drink 
and talk when drink and talk were to be had. In 
the sequel, also, it would seem that that old jealousy 
of his betters (to use the ancient phrase) had come 
to be a more disturbing influence than it had ever 
been before. He knew, none better, that, however 
brilliantly the poet had succeeded, the man was 
so far a failure as an investment, that, with bad 
health and a growing family, he had nothing to look 
forward to but promotion in the Excise ; and his dis- 
content with the practical outcome of his ambition 
and the working result of his fame was certainly not 
soothed, and may very well have been exacerbated, 
by his rather noisy sympathy with the leading 
principles of the French Revolution. He was too 
fearless and too proud to dissemble that sympathy, 
which was presently (1794) to find expression in one 
of his most vigorous and telling lyrics; he was, 
perhaps, too powerful a talker not to exaggerate its 
quality and volume; and, though it was common, 
in the beginning at least, to many Scotsmen, its 
expression got him, as was inevitable, into trouble 
with his superiors, and in the long-run was pretty 



336 ROBERT BURNS 

certainly intensified, to the point at which resentment 
is translated into terms of indiscretion and impru- 
dence, by the reflection, whether just or not, 1 that 
it had damaged his chances of promotion. That 
he fought against temptation is as plain as that 
he proved incapable of triumph, and that, as Carlyle 
has wisely and humanely noted, the best for him, 
certain necessary conditions being impossible, was 
to die. Syme, 2 who knew and loved him, said that he 
was ' burnt to a cinder ' ere Death took him ; we can 
see for ourselves that the Burns of tbe Kilmarnock 
Volume and the good things in the Museum had 



1 It seems to have been unjust. Pitt, though he loved the 
poetry of Burns, did nothing for him — was probably, indeed, too 
busy to think of doing anything once the page was read and the 
bottle done ; and Fox, to whom Burns looked for advancement, 
was ever out of office, and could do nothing, even had he been 
minded to do something, which we are not told that he was. 
But the Bard had a sure stay in Graham of Fintry; and, though 
Glencairn was dead, and he was sometimes reprimanded (et pour 
cause), there is no reason to believe that he would have missed 
preferment had he lived to be open to it. 

2 It has been said, I believe, that Syme's evidence is worthless, 
inasmuch as it tends to discredit Burns. But one eye-witness, 
however dull and prejudiced (and Syme was neither one nor 
other) is worth a wilderness of sentimental historians; and Syme's 
phrase, howbeit it is so picturesque that it conveys what is, 
perhaps, too violent an impression, probably means no more than 
that Burns had damaged himself with drink. That much Burns 
admitted time and again ; and Currie — who cannot but have got 
his information from Maxwell— remarks that for over a year 
before the end ' there was an evident decline of our Poet's 
personal appearance, and, though his appetite continued unim- 
paired, he was himself sensible that his constitution was sinking.' 
It was all, the doctor thought, the effect of alcohol on a difficult 
digestion and a sensitive nervous system; and, though he was 
something of a fanatic in this matter, I see no reason, as he was 
also an honest man, to question his diagnosis. 



ROBERT BURNS 337 

ceased to be some time before the end ; there is 
evidence that some time before the end he was 
neither a sober companion nor a self-respecting 
husband. And the reflection is not to be put by, 
that he left the world at the right moment for 
himself and for his fame. 

There is small doubt that the report of his mis- 
conduct was at best unkindly framed ; there is none 
that certain among his apologists have gone a very 
great deal too far in the opposite direction. We may 
credit Findlater, for instance, but it is impossible, 
having any knowledge of the man, to believe in the 
kind of Exciseman-Saint of Gray : impeccable in all 
the relations of life and never the worse for liquor : 
even as it is impossible to believe in the bourgeois 
Burns of the latest apotheosis. As Lockhart says, 
the truth lies somewhere between the two extremes ; 
and one is glad to agree with Lockhart. Even so, 
however, tradition, as reported by friends and enemies 
alike, runs stronger in his disfavour than it does 
the other way. 1 And, though we know that party 
feeling ran high in Dumfries, and that Burns — 
with his stiff neck, and his notable distinction, 
and his absolute gift of speech — did certainly damn 



i 'We are raising a subscription (horrid word) '—(thus Sir 
Walter, to Morritt, 15th January 1814)— 'for a monument to 
Burns, an honour long delayed, perhaps till some parts of his 
character were forgotten by those among whom he lived.' This 
was written within twenty years of Burns's death: when the 
grievance of the Revolution was lost in the shadow cast by the 
tremendous presence of Napoleon. And, if it be urged that 
Burns's offending against Toryism must have been rank indeed to 
be recalled thus bitterly and thus late, it may be retorted that by 
no possibility can it have been an hundredth part so indecent as 
VOL. IV. 



338 ROBERT BURNS 

himself in the eyes of many hy what, in the 
circumstances, must have seemed a suicidal intem- 
perance of feeling and expression, we know also 
that, once extremely popular, he was presently cut 
by Dumfries society ; that after a time his reputa- 
tion was an indifferent one on other counts than 
politics ; and that more than once — as in the case 
of Mrs. Riddell, and again, when he had to apologise 
for a toast no reasonable or well-bred man would 
have proposed in the presence of a King's officer, 
unless he were prepared to face the consequences — 
he behaved himself ill, according to the standard of 
good manners then and now. The explanation in 
these and other cases is that he was drunk ; and, as 
matter of fact, drink and disappointment were pretty 
certainly responsible between them for the mingled 
squalor and gloom and pathos of the end. There is 
nothing like liquor to make a strong man vain of his 
strength and jealous of his prerogative — even while 
it is stealing both away ; and there is nothing like 
disappointment to confirm such a man in a friend- 
ship for liquor. Last of all, there needs but little 
knowledge of character and life to see that to 
apologise for Burns is vain : that we must accept 
him frankly and without reserve for a peasant of 
genius perverted from his peasanthood, thrust into 
a place for which his peasanthood and his genius 

the conduct of the Parliamentary Whigs during the life and 
long after the death of Pitt. Of all men living Burns was 
entitled to an opinion; of all men living he had the best gift of 
expression. Well, he had his opinion, and he used his gift ; and 
Dumfries could not forgive him. It is again a question of cir- 
cumstances. Fox and the rest were honoured Members of His 
Majesty's Opposition. Burns was only an exciseman. 



ROBERT BURNS 339 

alike unfitted him, denied a perfect opportunity, 
constrained to live his qualities into defects, and in 
the long-run beaten by a sterile and unnatural en- 
vironment. We cannot make him other than he was, 
and, especially, we cannot make him a man of our 
own time : a man born tame and civil and unexces- 
sive — ' he that died o' Wednesday,' and had obituary 
notices in local prints. His elements are ail-too gross, 
are ail-too vigorous and turbulent for that. ' God 
have mercy on me,' he once wrote of himself, ' a poor 
damned, incautious, duped, unfortunate fool! the 
sport, tbe miserable victim of rebellious pride, hypo- 
chondriac imaginations, agonising sensibility and 
bedlam passions.' Plainly he knew himself as his 
apologists have never known him, nor will ever 
know. 

That his intellectual and temperamental endow- 
ment was magnificent we know by the way in 
which he affected his contemporaries, and through 
the terms in which some of them — Robertson, Heron, 
Dugald Stewart, and, especially, Maria Riddell — 
recorded their impression of him ; yet we know also 
that, for all its magnificence, or, as I prefer to 
think, by reason of its magnificence, it could not 
save him from defeat and shame. Where was the 
lesion ? What was the secret of his fall ? Lord 
Rosebery, as I think, has hit the white in saying 
that he was ' great in his strength and great in 
his weaknesses.' * His master-qualities, this critic 

1 I note with pleasure that Lord Rosebery knows too much of 
life, and is too good a judge of evidence, to think of putting a 
new complexion on the facts of these last, unhappy years. But 
has he been explanatory enough ? What, after all, but failure is 
possible for strength misplaced and misapplied ? 



340 ROBERT BURNS 

very justly notes, were 'inspiration and sympathy.' 
But if I would add 'and character' — which, to be 
sure, is largely an effect of conditions — how must 
the commentary run ? There is pride — the pride of 
Lucifer : what did it spare him in the end ? There 
is well-nigh the finest brain conceivable ; yet is 
there a certain curious intolerance of facts which 
obliges the owner of that brain, being a Government 
officer and seeing his sole future in promotion, to 
flaunt a friendship with roaring Jacobins like Max- 
well and Syme, and get himself nicknamed a ' Son 
of Sedition,' and have it reported of him, rightly 
or not, that he has publicly avowed disloyalty at 
the local theatre. 1 There is a passionate regard 
for women ; with, as Sir Walter noted, a lack of 
chivalry which is attested by those lampoons on 
living Mrs. Riddell and on dead Mrs. Oswald. 
There is the strongest sense of fatherhood, with 
the tenderest concern for ' weans and wife ' ; and 
there is that resolve for pleasure which not even 
these uplifting influences can check. There is a 
noble generosity of heart and temper ; but there is 
so imperfect a sense of conduct, so practical and so 
habitual a faith in a certain theory : — 



l I do not for an instant forget that here is more circumstance : 
that he was a true Briton at heart, and that in the beginning his 
Jacobinism was chiefly, if not solely, an effect of sympathy with 
a tortured people. But there are ways and ways of favouring an 
unpopular cause; and Burns's were alike defiant and unwise. 
Thus Maxwell was practically what most people then called a 
1 murderer ' — of the French King; yet it was while, or soon after, 
the enormities of the Terror were at their worst, that he became 
a chief associate of Burns. To some this seems a 'noble im- 
prudence.' Was it not rather pure incontinence of self ? 



ROBERT BURNS 341 

' The heart ay 's the part ay 
That makes us right or wrang': — 

that in the end you have a broken reputation, and 
death at seven or eight and thirty is the effect of 
a discrediting variety of causes. Taking the pre- 
cisian's point of view, one might describe so extra- 
ordinary a blend of differences as a bad, well- 
meaning man, and one might easily enough defend 
the description. But the precisian has naught to 
do at this grave-side; and to most of us now it is 
history that, while there was an infinite deal of the 
best sort of good in Burns, the bad in him, being 
largely compacted of such purely unessential defects 
as arrogance, petulance, imprudence, and a turn for 
self-indulgence, this last exasperated by the condi- 
tions in which his lot was cast, was not of the worst 
kind after all. Yet the bad was bad enough 
to wreck the good. The little foxes were many 
and active and greedy enough to spoil a world 
of grapes. The strength was great, but the weak- 
nesses were greater ; for time and chance and 
necessity were ever developing the weaknesses at 
the same time that they were ever beating down 
the strength. That is the sole conclusion possible. 
And to the plea, that the story it rounds is very 
pitiful, there is this victorious answer : — that the 
Man had drunk his life to the lees, while the Poet 
had fulfilled himself to the accomplishing of a pecul- 
iar immortality ; so that to Burns Death came as a 
deliverer and a friend. 

W. E. H. 



INDEX TO ESSAY 



A Bard's Epitaph, 259. 

A Big-Bellied Bottle (No Church- 
man Am T), 330. 

A Cock-Laird Fu' Cadgie, 324. 

Addison, '237. 

Address to a Haggis, 303. 

Address to the Unco Gruid, 257, 
273. 

Address to the Deil, 257, 274,276. 

Ae Fond Kiss, and Then We 
Sever, 304, 306. 

Aiken, Robert, 257, 293, 300. 

Ainslie, Robert, 303, 308, 309, 
310. 

Alloway Cottage, 235. 

A Poet's Welcome to His Love- 
begotten Daughter, 251, 259, 
260, 274. 

A Red Red Rose, 327, 331. 

Armour, Jean, 280-292. 

Reconciliation with, 303, 

307-311. 

Arnot, John, 289. 

A Rose-bud, By My Early Wall; 
330. 

Auld, Rev. William, 281. 

Auld Lang Syne, 327, 331. 

Authors read by Burns, 240- 
242, 263. 

A Waukrife Minnie, 331. 

Ayr, 242. 

Ayton, Sir Robert, 325, 32ft. 

Ay Waukin, 0, 328, 331. 



Bachelors' Club, 246, 257. 

Ballantine, John, 294, 302. 

Ballochmyle, Lass of, 248. 

Barbour, 265. 

Beattie, 263, 284. 

Begbie, Ellison, 249. 

Begg, Mrs., 260. 

Birth, 233, 235. 

Blacklock, Dr. Thomas, 294. 

Blair, Dr. Hugh, 296. 

Blake, 273. 

Bonnie Heck, 266. 

Border Tour, 303. 

Braxfield, M 'Queen of, 299. 

Brice, David, 284. 

Brown, Agnes (Mrs. William 

Burness), 235. 

Richard, 249, 250, 310, 311. 

Browning, 273. 

Bruce, Arthur, 300. 

Buchan, Earl of, 296. 

Burness (or Burnes), William, 

235-246, 253, 254. 
Burnet, Miss Elizabeth, 296. 
Burns, Elizabeth, 316. 
Gilbert, 237, 238, 240, 

241, 247, 248, 254, 256, 288, 

294. 
Burns, Robert — 
Birth, 233, 235. 
Character and Influence, 

234. 
Parentage, 235. 



344 



INDEX TO ESSAY 



Burns, Robert — continued: — 

Education and Favourite 
Authors, 236-242. 

Mount Oliphant, 239-245. 

Effects of Early Hardship, 
243-245. 

Lochlie, 246-254. 

Early Love Affairs, 247, 248, 
249. 

Attitude towards Women, 
247. 

Irvine, 249-253. 

Love - begotten Daughter, 
251, 259. 

Death of his father, 253. 

Mossgiel, 254-312. 

As a Farmer, 256. 

Anti-clerical Poems, 257. 

Jacobitism, 258. 

Temperament, 258. 

Elizabeth Paton, 259. 

Characteristics of his Po- 
etry, 261-279. 

Influence of Robert Fergus- 
son and the Vernacular 
Poets, 262. 

Vernacular and English 
Verse contrasted, 262-269. 

Influence on Wordsworth 
and Byron, 264. 

Relation to his Predeces- 
sors, 269-279. 

Masterpieces, 273. 

Humour, 275. 

Realism, 278. 

Jean Armour and Mary 
Campbell, 279-292. 

Kilmarnock Edition, 292. 

Mrs. Dunlop's Influence, 
292. 

Edinburgh, 294-303. 

Conversational Powers and 
Dissipation, 299-301. 



Burns, Robert — continued : — 

First Edinburgh Edition, 
301. 

Border Tour, 303. 

Highland Tours, 303. 

Johnson's Musical Museum, 
303. 

Reconciliation with Jean 
Armour, 303. 

Mrs. M'Lehose (Clarinda), 
304-312. 

Relations with Jean Ar- 
mour, 307-311. 

Marriage, 311, 312. 

Ellisland, 312-315. 

Excise Appointment, 313, 
319. 

Sale at Ellisland and re- 
moval to Dumfries, 315. 

Anne Park, 315, 316. 

Chloris, 317. 

Too great for his Circum- 
stances, 320. 

As a Song-writer, 321-334. 

Dumfries, 334-341. 

Decadence and Failing 
Health, 335. 

Intellectual and Tempera- 
mental Endowment, 339. 

Jacobinism, 340. 

Death, 341. 
Byron, 234, 264, 271, 273, 275, 

297. 

Caledonian Hunt, 301. 
Campbell, Mary, 283, 285-292. 
Carew, 325, 326. 
Castle Gordon, 330. 
Chambers, Robert, 285, 288, 301, 

316. 
Charlie He 's my Darling, 334. 
Chloris, 317. 
Clarinda, 304-312, 320. 



INDEX TO ESSAY 



345 



Clarinda, Mistress of My Soul, 

330. 
Cleghorn, Robert, 239. 
Conversational Powers, 300. 
Cork, Lord, 299. 
Corn Rigs, 268, 273. 
Cowper, 272. 

Creech, William, 296, 301. 
Crochallan Fencibles, 296, 299, 

308. 
Currie, Dr., 288, 316, 336. 

Dalkymple, James, of Orange- 
field, 295, 296. 

Dalryrnple Parish School, 241. 

Death and Br. Hornbook, 274. 

Death, 318, 341. 

Despondency, 283. 

Dodsley, 326. 

Douglas, Gawain, 265, 278. 

Drink to Me Only With Thine 
Eyes, 327. 

Dumfries, 315, 334-341. 

Dunbar, William, 265, 278. 

Duncan Davison, 326, 331. 

Duncan Gray, 331. 

Dunlop, Mrs., 288, 292, 301, 302, 
314, 315. 

Edinburgh, Burns in, 294-303. 

Edinburgh Edition, First, 301. 

Education and Favourite Au- 
thors, 236-242. 

Eglintoun, Earl of, 302. 

Elegy on Captain Matthew Hen- 
derson, 314. 

EllibanTcs and Ellibraes, 323, 324. 

Ellisland, 311, 312-315, 318-321. 

Epistle to a Young Friend, 258, 
290. 

to Davie (Sillar), 261, 274, 

341. 

to J. Lapraik, 274. 



Epistle to James Smith, 274. 

to John Rankine, 252, 258, 

260, 274. 

to William Creech, 303. 

Epitaph on Robert Fergusson, 
262. 

Errock Brae, 265, 324. 

Erskine, Harry, Dean of Fac- 
ulty, 296. 

Excise Appointment, 313, 319. 

Prospects of Promotion, 

335. 

Fee Him, Father, 324. 
Fergusson, Provost, of Ayr, 

235, 245. 
Robert, 261, 264, 271, 278, 

326. 
Findlater, Alexander, 337. 
Finlay ( Wha is That at My 

Bower Boor?), 331. 
Flax-dressing at Irvine, 249. 
Fleming, Nanie, 288. 
For the Sake of Somebody, 326, 

331. 
Fox, Charles James, 336, 338. 
Freemasonry, 246. 
French Revolution, Sympathy 

with, 335, 340. 

Garrick, 325. 

Gat Ye Me, 326. 

Glencairn, Lord, 296, 302, 313, 

336. 
Glenriddell, Riddell of, 313. 
Gordon, Duchess of, 296, 297. 
Graham of Fintrv, 299, 313, 336. 
Gray, 262, 263, 272, 284. 
Gray, Farquhar, 337. 
Green Grow the Rashes, 268, 

273. 
Gregory, Dr., 296. 
Grose, Captain, 314. 



346 



INDEX TO ESSAY 



Halloween, 264, 273, 276, 277, 

279. 
Hamilton, Gavin, 257, 258, 285, 

292, 296, 298, 300, 312. 
Hamilton of Gilbertfield, 262, 

266, 271. 
Helen of Kirkconnel, 324. 
Henryson, Robert, 265, 278. 
Heron, Robert, Author of Life 

of Burns, 293, 299, 300, 301, 

302, 312, 316, 339. 
Herrick, 275. 
Highland Tours, 303. 

Holy Willie's Prayer, 257, 264, 

273, 274, 276. 
How Pleasant the Banks of the 

Char Winding Devon, 330. 
Hume, David, 234. 
Hutcheson, Francis, 233, 234. 

/ Hae a Wife, 331. 

Irvine, 249. 

Is There For Honest Poverty (A 

Man's a Man), 330, 331. 
It Was A' For Our Rightfu' 

King, 327, 331, 332. 

Jacobinism, 335, 340. 

Jacobitism, 258, 332. 

Jenny M'Craw, 265, 324. 

Johnie Scott, 324. 

Johnson's Musical Museum, 

303, 314, 321, 334. 

Keats, 271, 272, 273, 275. 
Kilmarnock Edition, 281, 292. 
Kirk of Scotland, 233, 234, 236, 

257, 260, 281. 
Kirkoswald, 244, 247. 
Knox, John, 236, 278. 

Laments on Luckie Spence 
and Others, 267. 



Landlady, Count the Lawin, 

326. 
Last May a Braw Wooer, 331. 
Lawrie, Rev. Dr., 295. 
Lewars, Jessie, 318. 
Lindsay, David, 265, 278. 
Lloyd, 325. 
Lochlie, 246-254. 
Lockhart, 276, 299, 337. 
Lorimer, Jean, 317. 

M'Clure (William Burness's 

landlord), 253. 
M'Diarmid, 315. 
Mackenzie, Henry, 296, 301. 
M'Lehose, Mrs. (Clarinda), 304- 

312, 320. 
M'Pherson's Lament, 331. 
Molly Stewart, 327. 
Marlowe, 272. 
Marriage, 311, 312. 
Mary Morison, 273, 332. 
Mauchline, 257, 303, 307. 
Maxwell, Dr. William, 336, 

340. 
Mayne, 326. 
Merry Muses of Caledonia, 296, 

298, 324. 
Miller, Betty, 290. 
, Patrick, of Dalswinton, 

312. 
Milton, 268, 272, 275. 
Mirabeau, 320. 
Montgomerie, 272, 278. 
Moore, Letters to, 237, 240, 246, 

250, 251. 
Morris, Captain, 299. 
Mossgiel, 254-312. 
Mount Oliphant, 239-245. 
Muir, Robert, 282, 292, 302. 
Murdoch, John, Schoolmaster, 

237-242. 



DEC16?S48 



INDEX TO ESSAY 



347 



My Auntie Jean Held to the 
Shore, 316. 

Nature's Law, 292. 
Nicol, William, 303. 
No Churchman Am I (A Big- 
bellied Bottle), 330. 

Of A' the Airts, 315, 331, 334. 

Oliphant, Mount, 239-245. 

May, Thy Morn Was Ne'er 

Sae Sweet, 306. 
On a Bank of Flowers, 330, 334. 
On Captain Grose, 314. 
Orr, Thomas, 289. 
Oswald, Mrs., 340. 
O, Waly, Waly, 323, 324. 
O, Were My Love, 324. 
O, Wert Thou in the Cauld Blast, 

331. 

Parentage, 235. 

Park, Anne, 315, 316. 

Paton, Elizabeth, 249, 257, 259, 

260, 280, 289, 291. 
Peacock, Flax-dresser, Irvine, 

249, 250. 
Peasant, Scots, Character of, 

252. 
Peasant's, Scots, Condition of 

Life, 236. 
Pinkerton, 265. 
Pitscottie, Lindsay of, 278. 
Pitt, William, 336, 338. 
Poor Mailie's Elegy, 266, 271, 

274. 
Poosie Nansie, 277. 
Pope, 263, 266. 

Ramsay, Allan, 262, 265, 266, 

267, 271, 278, 326, 328. 
Ramsay of Auchtertyre, 258, 

299. 



Raving Winds Around Her 

Blowing, 330. 
Reply to a Trimming Epistle, 

252, 258, 260, 274. 
Richmond, John, 257, 282, 285, 

288, 291, 292, 295, 296. 
Riddell, Maria, 297, 317, 320, 

338, 339, 340. 
Robertson, the Historian, 339. 
Rosebery, Earl of, 339. 

St. Andrew's Lodge, Edin- 
burgh, 296. 

Scotch Drink, 271, 274. 

Scots Wha Hae, 263, 330, 334. 

Scott, Alexander, 265, 278. 

Sir Walter, 297, 306, 337, 

340. 

Scott Douglas, 315, 316. 

Sedley, 325. 

Sempills, The, 262, 265, 271, 
278. 

Sensibility How Charming, 330. 

Shakespeare, 238, 268, 272, 275. 

Shelley, 271, 273. 

Shenstone, 263, 266, 284. 

Sillar, David, 248. 

Sloan, John, 315. 

Smith, Adam, 234. 

James, 281,282. 

Songs of Burns, 321-334. 

Stevenson, R. L., 251, 262, 267, 
285, 289, 291. 

Stewart, Dugald, 262, 295, 296, 
339. 

Strathallan's Lament, 330. 

Sweetest May, 326. 

Sylvander, 305. 

Syme, John, 336, 340. 

Tait, Saunders, 248, 249, 254, 

307. 
Tarn Glen, 331. 



348 



INDEX TO ESSAY 



Tam o' Shanler, 263, 265, 269, 

274, 277, 314, 321. 
Tam Samson's Elegy, 271, 274. 
Tarbolton Mill, 307. 
The Author's Earnest Cry and 

Prayer, 274. 
The Banks o' Doon, 331. 
The Brigs of Ayr, 271. 
The Bumper Toast, 299. 
The Cotter's Saturday Night, 

257, 263, 271, 274, 276, 300. 
The Court of Equity, 257, 290, 

300, 331. 
The Death and Dying Words of 

Poor Mailie, 261, 266. 
The Farmer to His Auld Mare, 

264, 273. 
The Five Carlins, 314. 
The Fornicator, 252, 257, 260, 

300. 
The Gloomy Night is Gathering 

Fast, 294. 
The Holy Fair, 257, 271, 273, 

274, 276, 277, 307. 
The Holy Tulyie {The Twa 

Herds), 257, 274. 
Their Groves of Sweet Myrtle, 

330. 
' The Isle,' 312. 
The Jolly Beggars, 257, 273, 

276, 277, 315, 316. 
The Kirk's Alarm, 257, 313. 
The Lament, 283. 
The Lark, 329. 

The Lass of Ballochmyle, 248 
Theobald, 326. 
The Ordination, 257, 274. 
The School for Love, 239. 
The Silver Tassie, 331. 
The Twa Corbies, 323, 324. 



The Twa Dogs, 245, 273. 

The Twa Herds: or, The Holy 

Tulyie, 1b7, 274. 
The Vision, 263, 274. 
The Whistle, 314. 
The Winter It Is Past, 326, 334. 
Thomson, George, 317, 321, 334. 

James, 272, 284. 

Peggy, 247, 289. 

Thomson's Scottish Airs, 321. 
Thou Ling'ring Star, 288, 314. 
To a Louse, 273. 
To a Mountain Daisy, 263, 271, 

274, 300. 
To a Mouse, 271, 273. 
Toddlin Hame, 323, 324. 
To John Goldie, 257. 
To the Guidwife of Wauchope 

House, 303. 
Turn Again, Thou Fair Eliza, 

330. 

Vernacular School of Po- 
etry, 234, 261-279, 321-334. 

Walker, Josiah, 299. 

We're A' Noddin, 326. 
West Indies, 281, 287, 294. 

Whistle an' I'll Come To Ye, 

331. 
Williams, Helen Maria, 313. 

Willie Brew'd a Peck o' Maut, 
304, 314, 331, 334. 

Winter, 271. 
Wordsworth, 264, 273. 

Ye Banks and Braes o' Bonie 

Doon, 331. 
Yestreen I Had a Pint o' Wine, 

315. 



ROBERT BURNS 

HIS LIFE, GENIUS 
ACHIEVEMENT 



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